Folkways, by William Graham Sumner

A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages,
Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals

CHAPTER XVI

SACRAL HARLOTRY. CHILD SACRIFICE

Men's clubhouses. — Consecrated women. — Relation of sacral harlotry and child sacrifice. — Reproduction and food supply. — The Gilgamesh epic. — The Adonis myth. — Religious ritual, religious drama, and harlotry. — The Babylonian custom; its relation to religion. — Religion and the mores. — Cases of sacral harlotry. — The same customs in the Old Testament. — The antagonism of abundance and excess. — Survivals of sacral harlotry; analogous customs in Hindostan. — Lingam and yoni. — Conventionalization. — Criticism of the mores of Hindostan. — Mexican mores; drunkenness. — Japanese mores. — Chinese religion and mores. — Philosophy of the interest in reproduction; incest. — The archaic is sacred. — Child sacrifice. — Beast sacrifice substituted for child sacrifice. — Mexican doctrine of greater power through death. — Motives of child sacrifice. — Dedication by vows. — Degeneration of the custom of consecrating women. — Our traditions come from Israel. — How the Jewish view of sensuality prevailed.

The topics treated in this chapter are further illustrations of the power of the mores to make anything right, and to protect anything from condemnation. See also Chapter XVII.

585. Men's clubhouses. It is a very common custom in barbaric society that the men have a clubhouse in which they spend much of their time together and in which the unmarried men sleep. Such houses are centers of intrigue, enterprise, amusement, and vice. The men work there, carry on shamanistic rites, hold dances, entertain guests, and listen to narratives by the elders. Women are excluded altogether or at times. In the Caroline Islands such houses are institutions of social and religious importance. While the women of the place may not enter them, those from a neighboring place live in them for a time in license, but return home with payment which is used partly for religious purposes and partly for themselves.1885

534586. Consecrated women. It may even be said to be the current view of uncivilized peoples, up to the full development of the father family, that women have free control of their own persons until they are married, when they pass under a taboo which they are bound to observe. Therefore before marriage they may accumulate a dowry. Very many cases also occur of men-women and women-men, persons of either sex who assume the functions and mode of life of the other. Cases also occur in barbarism of women consecrated to the gods. Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of West Africa1886 girls of ten or twelve are received and educated for three years in the chants and dances of worship, serving the priests. At the end of the time they become public women, but are under no reproach, because they are regarded as married to the god and acting under his direction. Properly they should be restricted to the worshipers at the temple, but they are not. Probably such was the original taboo which is now relaxed and decayed. Children whom such women bear belong to the god. The institution "is essentially religious in its origin and is intimately connected with phallic worship."

587. Sacral harlotry and child sacrifice. These observations may serve to introduce a study of the phenomena, so incomprehensible to us, of sacral prostitution and child sacrifice. That study is calculated to show us that the mores define right and wrong. It would be a great mistake to regard the above cases as mere aberrations of sex appetite. The usages had their origin in interests. Sacral harlotry was a substitute for the child sacrifice of females. The other incidental interests found advantage in it. It was an attempt to solve problems of life. It was regarded as conducive to welfare, and was connected with religion. It was kept up by the conservatism and pertinacity of religious usage until a later time and another set of conditions, when it became vicious.

588. Reproduction and food supply. The operations of nature by which plants and animals reproduce are of great interest and importance to man, because on them depends the abundance of 535his food supply. It is impossible to tell when this interest would "begin," but it would become intense whenever the number of men was great in proportion to the food supply. Hence the rainfall, the course of the seasons, the prevalence of winds, the conjunction of astronomical phenomena with spawning or fruit seasons, and the habits of plants and animals caught the feeble attention of savage man and taught him facts of nature, through his eagerness to get signs of coming plenty or suggestions as to his own plans and efforts. Attention has been called to a very interesting fact about the fructification of the domesticated date palm wherever oasis cultivation prevailed in western Asia.1887 The fructification must be artificial. Men carry the pollen to the female plant and adopt devices to distribute it on the wind or by artificial contact. At the present time this is done by attaching a bunch of the male seed on a branch to windward.1888 Tylor first suggested that certain ancient pictorial representations are meant to depict the work of artificial fructification as carried on by mythological persons, — cherubim, who represent the winds.1889 The function of the wind distributing the seed is divine work. The tree is of such supreme value1890 that the well living of men depends on this operation. The sex conjunction therefore was the most important and beneficent operation in nature, and correct knowledge of it was the prime condition of getting an abundant food supply. Man followed the operation with all the interest of the food supply and all the awe of religion. It is certain that his interest in it was "innocent." He began to mythologize about it on account of the grand elements of welfare, risk, and skill which were in it. A parallel case is furnished by the treatment accorded to rice by the Javanese. It is to them the great article of food supply. They endow it with a soul and ascribe to it sex passion. They have ceremonies by which to awaken this passion in the rice as a means of increasing their own food supply. The ceremonies consist in sympathetic magic by men and women at night.1891

536589. The Gilgamesh epic. The Gilgamesh epic which originated in the Euphrates valley more than 2000 years B.C.1892 consists of a number of episodes which were later collected and coördinated into a single work like other great epics. Jastrow1893 construes it as a variation of the story of Adam and Eve. Gilgamesh is a hero admired by all women. The elders of Uruk beg his mother, the mother-goddess Aruru (a form of Ishtar), to restrain him. In order to comply she makes of clay Eabani, a satyr-like, hairy wild man, with a tail and horns, who lives with the beasts. Jastrow thinks that this means that he consorted with female beasts, having as yet no female of his own species. No one could capture him, so the god Shamash assailed him by lust, sending to him a priestess of Ishtar who won him to herself (woman) away from beasts. She said to him: "Thou shalt be like a god. Why dost thou lie with beasts?" "She revealed his soul to Eabani." She was, therefore, a culture heroine, and the myth means that, with the knowledge of sex, awoke consciousness, intelligence, and civilization. Eabani followed the priestess to Uruk, where he and Gilgamesh became comrades, — heroes of war and slayers of monsters. Ishtar fell in love with Gilgamesh, but he refused her because all men and beasts whom she loved she reduced to misery. Her vengeance for this rejection brings woe and death on the two friends. The Mexicans had a similar myth that the sun god and the maize goddess produced life in vegetation by their sex activity. The sun god contracted venereal disease so that they probably connected syphilis with sexual excess.1894 In the worship of Ishtar at Uruk there were three grades of harlot priestesses, and there the temple consecration of women was practiced in recognition of the connection between the service of Ishtar and civilization. At first the goddesses of life and of love were the same. The Venus of reproduction and the Venus of carnal lust were later distinguished. At some periods the distinction was sharply maintained. At other times the former Venus was only an 537intermediary to lead to the latter. The Mexicans had two goddesses, — one of chaste, the other of impure, love. The festivals of the former were celebrated with obscene rites; those of the latter with the self-immolation of harlots, with excessive language and acts. The goddess was thought to be rejuvenated by the death of the harlots. The obscene rites were at war with the current mores of the people at the time. The demons of license became the guardians of good morals. They concealed the phallus. Sins of license were confessed to the gods of license.1895 Teteoinnan, the maize-mother, also became a harlot through the work of furthering growth, but in the service of the state she punished transgressions of the sex taboo.1896 This is as if the need of the taboo having been learned by the consequences of license and excess, the goddess of the latter became the guardian of the former. In the Semitic religions the beginning and end of life were attributed to supernatural agencies dangerous to man.1897 The usages to be mentioned below show that this was not an abstract dogma, but was accepted as the direct teaching of experience.

590. The Adonis myth. There was in the worship of Ishtar wailing for Tammuz (Adonis). He was either the son or the husband of Ishtar. She went to Hades to rescue him. His death was a myth for the decay of vegetation, and his resurrection was a myth for its revival. The former was celebrated with lamentations; the latter with extravagant rejoicings and sex license.1898 This legend, which under local modifications and much syncretism existed until long after Christianity was introduced in the Greco-Roman world, coincides with the laws of Hammurabi as to harlot priestesses.

591. Sacral harlotry. Three things which later reached strong independent development are here united, — religious ritual, religious drama (with symbols, pantomime, and mysteries which later came to be considered indecent), and harlotry. Sacral harlotry was the only harlotry. It was normal and was not a subject of ethical misgiving. It was a part of the religious and 538social system. When, later, prostitution became an independent social fact and was adjudged bad, sacral harlotry long continued under the conventionalization and persistence of religious usage (sec. 74), but then the disapproval of prostitution in the mores produced an ethical war which resulted in the abolition of harlotry. Sacral harlotry, while it lasted, was practiced for one of two purposes, — to collect a dowry for the women or to collect money for the temple.

592. The Babylonian custom; its relation to religion. Herodotus1899 states that the women of the Lydians and of some peoples on the island of Cyprus collected a dowry by freedom before marriage; that a woman chosen by the god from the whole nation remained in the little cell on top of the eight-storied tower at Babylon, and was said by the priests to share the couch of the god; that the Thebans in Egypt tell a similar story of their god; that at Patara, in Lycia, the priestess who gave the oracle consorted with the god; and that at Babylon every woman was compelled once to sacrifice herself to the first comer in the temple of Mylitta. The last statement was long considered so monstrous that it was not believed. That incredulity arose from modern mores, in which religion and sex license are so strongly antagonized that religion seems to us an independent force, of "divine origin," which is sent into the world with an inherent character of antisensuality, or as a revelation of the harm and wickedness of certain sex acts. That notion, however, is a part of our Jewish inheritance. The fact stated by Herodotus is no longer doubted. It is only one in a series of parallel cases, all of which must have originated in similar ideas and have been regarded as contributing in the same way to human welfare. Preuss1900 attempts to explain it. "It is only to be understood if men earlier, in order to make natural objects prosper, had practiced sex usages of a kind which later, according to the mores of daily life, seemed to them to be prostitution. From this development came the fact that the Germans called the Corn-mother the 'Great Harlot.'" We know that men have sacrificed their children and other human beings, the selected 539being the bravest or most beautiful; that they have mutilated themselves in all ways from the slightest to the most serious; that they have celebrated the most extravagant orgies; and that they have acted against their own most important interests, — all in the name of religion. There is nothing in religion itself which antagonizes sensuality, cruelty, and other base elements in human nature. Religion has its independent origin in supposed interests, and makes its own demands on men. The demands of religion are sacrifices and ritual observances. The whole religious system is evolved within the circle of interests, ideas, and mores which the society possesses at the time. Religion also finds adjustment and consistency with all other interests and tastes of the group at the time. A father of many daughters would use the temple service as a way to provide for one of them.1901 Religion is also extremely persistent. Therefore it holds and carries over to later ages customs which once were beneficial, but which at the later time are authoritative but harmful. If parents threw their children into the furnace to Molech, why should they not devote their daughters to Ishtar? If they once practiced sympathetic magic to make rice grow, religion might carry the customs over to a time when they would be shocking and abominable. Although the survival of these customs became sensual and corrupting, it is certain that it was not their original purpose to serve sensuality. They were not devices to cultivate or gratify licentiousness. We know of no case of a primitive custom with such a purpose. The provisions in the laws of Hammurabi are as simple and matter-of-fact as possible. They are provisions for actual interests which, it seemed, ought to be provided for. Another proof of the innocence of the customs is that in independent cases the same customs were established. The customs were responses of men to the great agents who (as they thought they perceived) wrought things in nature. The methods and means used by the agents were revered. They could not be despised or disapproved by men. Therefore reproduction was religious and sex was consecrated. The whole realm was one of 540mystery and wonder. Men became as gods by knowledge of it. From that knowledge they acquired power to make things grow and so got food and escaped want. The interest in sex, and the customs connected with it, was revivified in connection with agriculture. The mode of fructifying the date palm was a very great discovery in natural science. Primitive men would turn it into a religious fact and rule. The inference that women should be consecrated to the goddess of life and that in her service reproduction should be their sacred duty was in the logic of primitive people. Ishtar was polyandrous, but she turned into Astarte, the wife of the chief Baal, or else she became androgyne and then masculine. There is a virgin mother and a mother of the gods. The idea of the latter continued with invincible persistency. She may be unmarried, choosing her partners at will, or "queen, head, and first born of all gods."1902 In these changes we see the religious notions and the mores adjusting themselves to each other. As long as the underlying notions were true and sincere and the logic was honest, the usages were harmless. When the original notions were lost, or the logic became an artificial cover for a real ethical inconsistency, and the customs were kept up, perhaps to give gain to priests, the usages served licentiousness.

593. Religion and the mores. Religion never has been an independent force acting from outside creatively to mold the mores or the ideas of men. Evidently such an idea is the extreme form of the world philosophy in which another (spiritual) world is conceived of as impinging upon this one from "above," to give it laws and guidance. The mores grow out of the life as a whole. They change with the life conditions, density of population, and life experience. Then they become strange or hostile to traditional religion. In our own experience our mores have reached views about ritual practices, polygamy, slavery, celibacy, etc., which are strange or hostile to those in the Bible. Since the sixteenth century we have reconstructed our religion to fit our modern ideas and mores. Every religious reform in history has come about in this way. All religious doctrines and ritual 541acts are held immutable by strong interests and notions of religious duty. Therefore they fall out of consistency with the mores, which are in constant change, being acted on by all the observation or experience of life. Sacral harlotry is a case, the ethical horror of which is very great and very obvious to us, of old religious ideas and customs preserved by the religion into times of greatly changed moral (i.e. of the mores) and social codes.

594. Cases of sacral harlotry. Survivals of sacral harlotry are found in historic Egypt. Even under the Cæsars the most beautiful girl of the noble families of Thebes was chosen to be consecrated in the temple of Ammon. She gained honor and profit by the life of a courtesan, and always found a grand marriage when she retired on account of age. In all the temples there were women attached to the service of the gods. They were of different grades and ranks and were supposed to entertain the god as harem women entertained princes. In the temples of goddesses women were the functionaries and obtained great honor and power.1903 Constantine demolished the temples of impure cult in Phœnicia and Egypt and caused the priests to be scattered by soldiers. Farnell1904 thinks that the Babylonian custom (especially because it was required that the man should be a stranger) was due to fear of harm from the nuptial blood. The attendants in the temples are known as "hierodules." Otto1905 says that the hierodules were not temple slaves, or harlots, but he finds evidence that the temples had income from temple harlots. The Phœnicians who settled Carthage took the religion of western Asia with them. Perhaps there was an element of sensuality in the antecedent religion of north Africa which united with that of the imported religion. This would account for the cultus at Sicca, in Numidia. There was there a temple of Astarte or Tanith in which women lived who never went forth except to collect a dowry by harlotry.1906 At Byblos (Gebal), in Phœnicia, there was 542a great temple of the same goddess at which there were elaborate celebrations of the Adonis myth. There was sacral harlotry for strangers only, the money going as a sacrifice to the goddess. Every woman must have her head shaved in mourning for Adonis, or sacrifice herself under this custom.1907 Tanith has been identified with Artemis, and the later cults of Punic Africa give great prominence to the "celestial virgin," or "virginal numen." "The identification of the mother-of-the-gods with the heavenly virgin, that is, the unmarried goddess, is confirmed, if not absolutely demanded, by Augustine.1908 At Carthage she seems also to be identical with Dido."1909 "The Arabian Lat was worshiped by the Nabatæans as mother-of-the-gods and must be identified with the virgin-mother whose worship at Petra is described by Epiphanius."1910 In the worship of Anaitis in Armenia male and female slaves were dedicated to the goddess, but men of rank also consecrated their daughters. After long service they married, no one considering them degraded. They were not mercenary, being well provided for by their families. Therefore they received only their social equals.1911 Baal Peor seems also to have been a case of sacral harlotry.1912 The strongest reason for thinking so is Hosea ix. 10. Rosenbaum1913 interprets the pestilence as venereal. The kedeshim (male prostitutes) were expelled from Judah by Asa.1914 They had been there since Rehoboam.1915 They are heard of again.1916 They were under vows and brought their earnings to Jahveh.1917 Farnell1918 interprets a fragment of Pindar as proof of sacral harlotry at Corinth. At a temple of the Epizephyrian Locri it was practiced in fulfillment of a vow made by the people, under some ancient insult, to consecrate their daughters if the goddess would help them.1919 Farnell also1920 directs attention to a case in Sicily where the connection is with the Carthaginian Eryx. In 543the Cistellaria of Plautus the usage is referred to as Tuscan.1921 Augustus rebuilt Carthage and it appears that the old usages had survived the interval of one hundred and fifty years. The temple of Tanith was rebuilt and called that of the celestial virgin. The Romans forbade sacral harlotry, which was in strong antagonism to their sex mores. Hahn has called attention1922 to a passage which proves the existence of sacral harlotry in Scandinavia just before the introduction of Christianity in the tenth century. The hero remains through the winter with the woman who was the consecrated attendant of the god Frey and who traveled about with his wooden image. The people take the hero to be the god, and rejoice when the priestess becomes a mother by him.1923 The Mexicans, with the same interests, under like conditions evolved the same customs and similar ideas. Mayas of the lowest classes sent out their daughters to earn their own marriage portions.1924

595. The same customs in the Old Testament. In 1 Sam. i Hannah vowed that if God would give her a son she would devote him to the Lord, in sign of which no razor should touch him. She gave him to be an ædituus, who lived in the temple awaiting divine instructions and commissions. In Josh. ix. 23, 27 we have a case of war captives condemned to menial service in the temple. In Ezek. xliv. 8, 9, the people are blamed for putting heathen in the temple service instead of doing it themselves. The kedeshim, temple prostitutes of both sexes, are frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, especially at every reformation of the religion. They seem to become objects of condemnation within the period of the history.

596. Antagonism of abundance and excess. The Germans had a Corn-mother, a goddess of agricultural growth and fertility. The Mexicans also had a mother-of-the-gods, Teteoinnan. The former became a harlot. The latter, by her sex activity, brought about growth and abundant reproduction, and became a goddess of lewdness.1925 Thus wherever the agricultural interest controls 544this set of ideas we see the struggle between the idea that unrestrained sex indulgence produces abundance and the idea that it produces excess, lewdness, and harm. We can still trace to the metaphorical use of "mother," "father," and "son," and also to the use of the same words to express the possession of a quality in a high degree, or a tie of destiny, some of the most important concepts of our own religion.

597. Survivals of sacral harlotry. Analogous customs in Hindostan. The early Portuguese travelers to the East found sacral harlotry in Cochin China. All virgins of noble birth were bound by vows from infancy. Otherwise no honorable man would marry them.1926 Modern Egyptian dancing girls, Ghowazy or Barmeky, had a tradition that they belonged to a race by themselves. They kept up isolation and peculiar customs. Each was compelled to surrender to a stranger and then to marry a man of her own group.1927 "Probably Heaven and Earth are the most ancient of all Vedic gods, and from their fancied union, as husband and wife, the other deities and the whole universe were at first supposed to spring." "The whole world is embodied in the woman.... Women are gods. Women are vitality," say the Vedic Scriptures. In Manu1928 "the self-existent god is described as dividing his own substance and becoming half male and half female."1929 A competent author, who wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, says that the women attached to the temples in Hindostan sang and danced twice a day, the songs being about mythological subjects and indecent according to the current mores of everyday life. Vows play a very important part in the Hindoo system of sacral harlotry. A woman, with the consent of her husband, vowed her unborn child, if a girl, to the temple, in order to get an easy confinement. It was no disgrace to a family to have a daughter living this life. Barren women visited remote temples, under a vow of self-devotion, in order to bear children. They were victimized by the priests. At festivals of Vishnu priests tried to enlist girls in the attendant 545multitude. The line between the sacral usage and licentiousness was broken down at some remote resorts, but in the great temples the conduct of the women was not at all shameless, although they were trained to please. They observed perfect decorum. No one could venture on any impropriety with them. The bystanders would not allow it, and the proceedings were all controlled by strict rules. The Brahmins propounded a doctrine that intercourse with the consecrated women would free from sin.1930 The vows show us the motive which maintained this usage, and these statements clearly show the conventionalization which enveloped the whole. Although the practices in the temples have undergone some modification, they still exist. There are secret mysteries, and dramatic representations of mythological incidents, which seem like survivals of the ancient usages above mentioned.1931 There are courtesans at the temples near which pilgrims congregate, and they pay part of their earnings to the temple.1932 The holy festival of Jugganatha, at Puri, which is a spring festival of Vedic origin, is a kind of Saturnalia, in which the bonds of social order are loosened and the standards of decency are laid aside. There are rites in which "words are uttered by persons who, on other occasions, would think themselves disgraced by the use of them."1933 The Phalgun festival in northern India commemorates Krishna's voluptuous amusements. The rites are indecent.1934 The mythological stories about the gods have to be converted by interpretation or special pleas into something which modern mores can tolerate.1935 Songs, dances, pantomimes, and mythological dramas are represented in front of the image of a deity by men, but in the presence of a general company of men and women.1936 The Sakta worshipers are a sect who worship Sakta, the mighty, mysterious, feminine force recognized in nature, and which they personify as the Mother of the Universe, like the ancient Mother-goddess. This goddess is manifested, for Hindoos, in natural appetites, in highly developed 546faculties by which one exalts one's self and defeats one's enemies. The rites of the sect are horrible and obscene, and have for their purpose to violate and outrage the restrictions in the mores. By those rites men and women obtain union with the Supreme Being. The members of the sect call themselves "perfect ones" and all others "beasts." They use mystic texts and secret orgies, at which they drink strong drinks, eat meat and fish, and practice sex license. They recognize no caste.1937 There are also other sects which have inverted all conceptions of decency, propriety, and expediency. They practice self-torture, crime, and uncleanliness, and use loathsome food, etc. In all these matters they show great ingenuity of invention. They are dying out.1938 There are also sects which are cannibal, incestuous, and practicers of secret license and obscenity.1939 In some parts of the Madras presidency, girls are made basivis by a vow of the parents, in order to give them the privileges of males. This custom may be derived from the institution of the "appointed daughter," that is, a daughter selected in order that her son may perform the rites for her father (who had no son) and may carry on the line. Modern basivis "live in their father's house. They do not marry, yet they bear children, the father of whom they may choose at pleasure, and the children inherit their family name." It is a device to insure male descendants, and is so regulated by religious consecration and rules that it is recognized in the mores. If a basivi breaks the rules she falls to a status which is very different. Men are also dedicated and wear female dress, if they are born imperfect or malformed.1940

598. Lingam and yoni. The lingam symbol is to be seen all over India, alone or with the yoni. In some parts of India the lingam is worn as an amulet.1941 The word "lingam" is said to mean "symbol."1942 To Europeans the object seems indecent and obscene. 547If it is of phallic origin, "the Hindus are no more conscious of the fact than we of the similar origin of the maypole."1943 It is no more erotic than an egg or a seed. It is a symbol of Siva, the eternal reproductive power of nature, reintegrating after disintegration. One form of Siva is androgyne. The dualism of the male, spirit, and the female, matter, is essential to all creation. "To one imbued with these dualistic conceptions the lingam and the yoni are suggestive of no improper ideas."1944

599. Conventionalization. In all these cases it is evident that the mores extend their protection over archaic and sacred things, and preserve them instead of forbidding them. The great means of preserving them is by conventionalization. They are put under a conventional understanding, different from the everyday usages with their ethics, and are judged by an arbitrary standard. In the English translation of the Bible words and phrases are used which are archaic and now under taboo in everyday life. Our children have to be taught that "that is in the Bible," that is, they have to learn the conventionalization by which the archaic forms are covered. The words in the Bible are not subject to criticism, and they cannot be cited to justify similar usage in common life.

600. Mores of Hindostan. The phenomena which are presented in Hindostan, when studied from our standpoint, show how completely different may be the estimate of things according to use and wont. The phenomena are very different in character. Some of them are cases of degeneracy and aberration of customs, after they have been discarded by the mores, have become vicious, and have fallen into the hands of abandoned persons who have given up all position inside the mores. Others of these customs show how old usages, when brought in question, lose innocence. Consciousness and reflection produce doubt and then shame. Sometimes things which are private or secret by convention come in contact with things which are secret by vice. All the phenomena in Hindostan show how completely the moral effect depends on the integrity or decay of conventionalization. The conventionalization is still so strong 548that the effects on public morals which we might expect are not produced. Public manners are marked by decency and propriety and the society is not vicious.1945 Things which exist under conventionalization never furnish grounds for an ethical judgment on the group which practices them.

601. Mexican mores. Drunkenness. In Mexico also there were goddesses of erotic passion to whom men and women were consecrated. Courtesans sometimes immolated themselves in the service of the goddess. The notion of virtue in resistance to passion existed, but the goddess, like the Greek Venus, resented any effort to escape her sway and exerted herself to defeat it.1946 The Mayas did not maintain a severe form of sex taboo and they had festivals at which that taboo was entirely suspended.1947 Pederasty also existed under the sanction of religion. Young men in the training house, which was a house of lamentation and penance, were allowed license which was contrary to the current mores of the society, but was an old privilege of soldiers. The dances which they performed daily were obscene. The persons in the dance represented vegetation demons, and the dances helped to get good crops.1948 The notion was not to employ sympathetic magic, but the men, by parallel operations, were supposed to help in the work of fructification which the demons were accomplishing in the plant. Hence a great drama of human coöperation was carried on in the dances. Snakes and frogs were eaten because they were demons of rain and growth. The obscene dances were "not consequences of sex desire, but, on account of their antiquity, they were accepted as a matter of course."1949 At the time of the Spanish conquest public opinion about the dances was not fixed, but they lasted on through the force of ancient religious tradition. We may be sure that the case of Mexico throws light on the ancient usages of sacral harlotry. In comparatively recent times there were cases in Russia of sex license on the eve of great Christian festivals.1950 There is a parallel also, amongst the Mexicans, in 549the case of drunkenness. Religion controlled and forbade drunkenness, but then again allowed it on specified occasions. To drink pulque was forbidden, under penalty of death, except to prescribed persons at certain festivals, but on the festival of the fire god all intoxicated themselves by custom and tradition.1951 Kings in Central America were expressly allowed to intoxicate themselves at festivals, and functionaries were appointed to perform their duties while they were incapacitated. It is nowadays considered not dishonorable to become intoxicated during festivals, and "it may be observed that Indians now thank God for the gift of drunkenness."1952 That is a case of the persistence of ideas born of old mores long after another religion and social system have displaced the folkways themselves.

602. Japanese mores. In Japan the government formerly bought girls of fourteen from their parents and caused them to be educated in feminine accomplishments. For ten years they lived as courtesans to the profit of the state. They were then discharged with a sum of money. The number of them at one time was twenty thousand. They furnished at the tea houses afternoon entertainments at which families were present, but men alone remained later.1953 When a people, through acquaintance with mores different from its own, is led to philosophize about the latter, or is made conscious of them and uncertain about them, then the old mores of that people lose their innocence. The Japanese have had much experience of this within fifty years.

603. Chinese religion and mores. For contrast it may be worth while to notice the evidence collected by Schallmeyer1954 that the specifically Chinese religions are free from all immoral notions and usages. Indeed the Chinese religions are said to be hostile to indecency. Meadows is quoted as saying that any sentence of the canonical writings of China could be read in any English family without offense, and that there is nothing in Chinese religious rites resembling the immoral rites which are met with elsewhere. Chinese lyric poetry is said to be pure.

550604. Philosophy of interest in reproduction. Incest. Some reserve in regard to the interpretation of myths is proper and necessary, but the absorbing interest of sex production for man, after he begins to depend upon it and coöperate with it for his food supply, is a product of the study of myths which may be accepted with confidence. That interest was no more sensual than interest in the rainfall, and the mythologizing about it was no more depraved than mythologizing about creation or language. Men were sure to apply all which they learned about reproduction in food plants and animals to their own reproduction. If Chaldean civilization goes back five or six thousand years before Christ, then the Chaldeans had had ample time, even before Hammurabi, to experience the evils of overpopulation and of sex vice. In the Chaldean mythology Ishtar, goddess of all sex attraction and repulsion, destroyed all the lovers whom she selected. She had the double character, which appears in all myths and philosophy, of sex license and sex renunciation together. She was a goddess of the mother family and polyandric.1955 The two policies, sex license and sex renunciation, were both advocated at the same time in the early centuries of the Christian era and in the Middle Ages. Men found out that the problem of reproduction for them was far more complicated than the multiplication of dates to the utmost limit. At this point of knowledge instinctive or intelligent regulations had to be put on physical appetites. For primitive men the reproductive function is as simple a function as eating or sleeping. It is not in itself wicked or base. It is naïve until knowledge comes. Then it is found that rules must be made to regulate the interest. If there are rules, there is the sense of wrongdoing in the breach of them. A thing which is tabooed becomes interesting and more or less awful. The numbers of the sexes are never exactly equal, and the proportion is further disturbed by polygamy. Therefore experience of evil and inconvenience forced some reflection and some judgments as to life policy. Regulations were devised behind which there was a philosophy of the satisfaction of interests; that is to say, mores were developed 551to cover the case. There seems also to be some connection between sacral harlotry and the prevention of incest. The poorest who cannot marry or buy slaves have always practiced incest (sec. 516). Sacral harlotry won another religious sanction from these cases. In the laws of Hammurabi we find two classes of women attached to the temple. If the interpretations of the specialists may be trusted, the arrangement was in one class of cases in the nature of a life annuity, and those who had no husband had the god for a husband, — an idea which, with one or another new coloring, has come down to our own time. That any one should renounce the sex function was not within the mental horizon of early times. When the women lived in the temple that fact established conventionalization about them and gave to their life that regulation which has made decency and order in all ages. Their case was defined and sanctioned in the mores. The couples retired outside the temple.1956 When marriage was accompanied by very easy divorce and could not be defined except as a form of property right of the husband, when there were concubines who were not wives only because they had no property, and slaves who had no defined relation to the household until they had borne children to the head of it, the women in the temple might be surrounded by other special forms of taboo which would give them a status within the mores. They were "holy" by virtue of their consecration to the goddess.1957 So far as we know, their lives were not spent in dissipation. The accounts in Herodotus and Baruch vi. 43, of the later usage at Babylon show that there was method and decorum in the institution, and that it was carried on with conventional dignity. It is our custom to think out the consistency of all our doctrines and usages. It is certain that ancient peoples did not do that, just as the masses now do not. They accepted and lived in unquestioned usage. Therefore we know of cases in classic society in which maidens and matrons on special occasions shared in functions which seem totally repugnant to their character. The explanation lies in conventionalization within 552the mores for an occasion or under a conjuncture of circumstances. It is unquestionably possible that in that way lewdness can be set aside and thus corrupting effect on character can be prevented.

605. The archaic is sacred. In the minds of primitive people all which is archaic is sacred and all which is novel is questionable. Therefore religion holds and consecrates whatever is archaic and traditional. The appetites of men were anterior to any mores regulative of them, and the goddess Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, or Venus is a goddess of erotic passion and reproduction. The folkways devised to prevent experienced ills are an invasion of her domain and a rebellion against her sway. The regulations cannot be made absolute for a long time. There must be a compromise. Some females must be given to the goddess as devotees, at least under conditions, or there must be set times and places within which her sway shall be unhampered by human rules. The conditions establish conventionalization around an institution. It is by this process and by changing the conditions that marriage has been made what it now is. Concubinage, slave women, harlotry, and all other forms but the prescribed one have been put under taboo. It is very possible that some future generation will look back in wonder at our self-complacency, which feels no care or responsibility for the women who are forced, in our system, to renounce sex. It is safe to say that the Chaldeans of 2500 B.C. would have been as much shocked at the inhumanity of our arrangement as we can be at the lewdness of theirs.

606. Child sacrifice. The temple consecration of women must be connected with child sacrifice. The latter is logically anterior. Their historical relation we do not know. To dedicate a girl to the goddess would be an alternative to the sacrifice of her. All forms of child sacrifice and sacral suicide go back to the pangs and terrors of men under loss and calamity. Something must be found which would wring pity and concession from the awful superior powers who afflict mankind. Every one born under this human lot must perish if he is not redeemed. His first vicarious sacrifice is his firstborn, but if he can get a war captive from a 553foreign group this substitute may be accepted. The Mexican human sacrifices were of this kind. The people stood around assenting and rejoicing, because the rite meant salvation to themselves and their children. A man who took a captive in war gave him to the priest to be sacrificed, and he might not eat of the flesh, "since the victim was in a sense his son," that is, took the place of his son as a vicarious sacrifice for himself. They also sacrificed their own infants.1958 Child sacrifice expresses the deepest horror and suffering produced by experience of the human lot. Men must do it. Their interests demanded it, however much it might pain them. Human sacrifices may be said to have been universal. They lasted down to the half-civilized stage of all nations and sporadically even later,1959 and they have barely ceased amongst the present half-civilized peoples.1960 They are not primarily religious. They are a reaction of men under the experience of the ills of life, inventing a world philosophy and putting agents behind it, in order to have something, if it be only a delusion, to which hope of escape can attach. Human sacrifices are based on an inference or deduction. There is behind them an assumption as to the character and logic of the superior powers who rule the aleatory interest. It is not until skepticism arises as to this assumption that the usage can be given up.

607. Beast sacrifice substituted for human sacrifice. In the case of Abraham and Isaac, the former was "tried" by God, apparently meaning that he underwent some doubt whether he ought not to sacrifice his son as other west Semites did theirs, and whether a beast would not suffice (Gen. xxii. 7). For his descendants the legend fixed the usage and doctrine (verse 13), different from that of the other west Semites, that a beast was a due substitute. The Chaldees followed the same reasoning.1961 According to the mythology of the Egyptians there was a great destruction of men in the reign of the god Ra, but when he mounted to the sky he replaced the sacrifice of men by that of 554beasts.1962 In the tragedy of Iphigenia, Iphigenia is not slain. Artemis snatches her away and puts a hind in her place. Robertson Smith1963 thinks that the notion of the ancients that the sacrifice of human beings was anterior to that of beasts, and that the latter were substitutes, was a "false inference from traditional forms of ritual that had ceased to be understood." At Hierapolis sacrificed children were called oxen.1964 All the Baals demanded human sacrifices.1965 In every case in which the mores had overcome the terror which made human sacrifices, the mythology invented explanations. It was forbidden to the Jews to make their children "pass through the fire" to Molech.1966 They often did it. This shows that their mores had not yet outgrown it, but that religious teachers were trying to forbid it.1967 They held the same doctrine as the neighboring nations, that the firstborn belonged to God.1968 The firstborn must be sacrificed or redeemed.1969 They had doctrines of ransom by beasts, as above, or by money,1970 or by circumcision, if the incoherent text is rightly interpreted.1971 Nevertheless, they never were sure enough of their position before the captivity to hold to it against the faith and usage of neighboring nations.1972 The doctrine in Micah vi. 6-8, as early as the end of the eighth century B.C., raised the real issue about the sense and utility of all sacrifices in its widest form, but that doctrine was much too far beyond the mores of the time to have any effect.

608. Mexican doctrine of greater power through death. Preuss says: "In the ancient Mexican cultus I recognized, to my astonishment, that really spirits were killed in the sacrificed men, in order that they [the spirits] might thus be rendered capable of being born again, and rendering greater services to men."1973 555Death was believed to enhance the power of the spirits who ruled meteorological phenomena. The notion was that insects caused meteorological phenomena; then they were gods; the insects and beasts gave to the gods the magic power which they (insects and beasts) once had over rainfall, etc. The humming bird which hibernates and wakes again in spring was thought to cause the heat of summer. Therefore it was taken to be an envelope of the war god. Free flow of blood lets loose magic power. Hence the great bloodshedding in the Mexican cultus. "Human sacrifice is in Mexico the same in sense as beast sacrifice. In both cases, magic powers, magic beasts and spirits, are killed." By death new birth with greater magic power becomes possible.1974

609. Motives of child sacrifice. The Semites adopted the world philosophy which lies back of human sacrifice and incorporated it with their religion, which thereby became gloomy and ferocious. What a man must sacrifice was what he loved most, and that was his firstborn child. It was rationalizing to argue that a beast could be substituted with equal effect, and we often find that people who had advanced to that point of philosophy, when face to face with a great calamity showed that they did not believe that the effect was equal. They went back to child sacrifice.1975 The Hebrews in the seventh century thought that they felt the wrath of God and they tried to avert it in this way.1976 Tiele thinks that there is no evidence of child sacrifice or of the temple consecration of women in the Euphrates valley in historical times, but in Syria and Arabia child sacrifice lasted on in spite of the culture of the Aramæans and Phœnicians. In old Arabia fathers burned their little daughters as sacrifices to the goddess.1977 Human sacrifices were used for auguries before any important enterprise, and as thank offerings for victory or success. Every year a number of children of the foremost families were sacrificed as an expiation for the sins of the nation, "while fiendish music drowned their cries and the lamentations of their mothers."1978 556The Carthaginians kept up the custom. The leading families were bound to furnish the sacrifice as representatives of the commonwealth. The children to be sacrificed were selected by lot from those who were liable. Children were exchanged in order to be saved. The parents might not lament, for to do so would deprive the sacrifice of its efficacy.1979 The custom was an abomination to the Romans, but it was so firmly fixed in the mores of the Carthaginians that the conquerors could not stop it. The proconsul Tiberius put an end to it by hanging the priests of the cult to the trees of their own temple grove.1980 As Tertullian says that soldiers who executed this order were still living when he wrote, the order of Tiberius must have been issued about the middle of the second century A.D. or a little later.

610. Dedication by vows. The connection between child sacrifice and the temple consecration of girls is in the substitution of the latter for the former, as a ransom. The girl devoted to death belonged to the goddess in one way, if not in the other. Vows made in illness sometimes included such substitution. In the historic period, after child sacrifice had ceased in the Euphrates valley, many variations occurred. Barren women made vows. Children were vowed to the goddess for life or for a time. They were redeemed by money which they earned in the temple life. The accumulation of a dowry was only a variation.1981 In later times (second century A.D.) we find the sacrifice of a woman's hair as a substitute for herself.1982 Men were also dedicated in sex perversion.

611. Degeneration of the customs of consecrating women. Evidently vicarious sacrifice and expiatory sacrifice are very ancient heathen ideas. They contain deductions and assumptions about the nature of the deity which are of the first theological importance. The cases of custom which have been described also show the power and persistency of theological dogma to override for centuries the strongest interests and sentiments. Evidently the variations in the custom marked the breaking down of the boundaries which held it firm in the religious 557mores. The Babylonian custom described by Herodotus seems to be a variation by which every woman was held bound to the goddess. Then sensuality, priestcraft, greed, and frivolity easily used such a custom until it became a root of corruption. This is what happened, and forms of the custom which had no sense but the gratification of licentiousness spread around the Mediterranean. The old female sex mores were very simple and austere, but they were corrupted after the middle of the second century B.C. Those of Roman Carthage, if we can trust Salvianus, became more corrupt than those of Punic Carthage ever had been. They were less ferocious and more frankly voluptuous. Salvianus's description of southern Gaul makes it as bad as Africa. According to him the Vandals were pure-minded, and their mores were so pure and firm that they successfully resisted the Roman corruption and put the sex relation back again on the basis of the "law of God."1983

612. Our traditions from Israel. If now we turn back to the Israelites we can see the stream by which our own mores have come down to us. There arose amongst the Israelites, in the tenth century B.C., an opposition to the religion which was common to the west Semites. It was like the reform of the Iranian religion by the magi, who produced a religion which was too severe and exacting for any but priests to live by it. There have also been many attempts to reform Islam from within. They have taken the form of throwing off later additions and returning to primitive purity, that is, to the mode of life of Arabs in Mohammed's time. In some cases (e.g. the Wahabees of the nineteenth century) the reforms have originated with people who were on a lower grade of life than the mass of Moslems. Present-day scholars find the origin of the resistance of Israelitish prophets to the prevailing religion of western Asia in the hostility of a rustic population, with a primitive mode of life and archaic mores, to the luxury of Tyre and Sidon, wealthy cities of commerce and industry.1984 The conflict was between two sets of mores. The biblical scholars now tell us that Jahveh 558was a Baal amongst other Palestinian Baals until this antagonism arose. Then he was made the god in whose name the ancient mores of Israel were defended against the introduction of luxury and licentiousness. The antagonism was between simple, rustic, largely pastoral modes of life and the ways of cities with wealth, culture, and luxury. This is a permanent social antagonism, but it carried with it the antagonism of simplicity to sensuality, materialism, formal manners, and luxury. For four or five centuries a succession of "prophets" developed the antagonism between the Jahveh religion and heathenism. They maintained that Jahveh was not only the single god of the Hebrews but the sole God of all the earth. Other gods were nullities. The prophets condemned idolatry, and all sensuality, licentiousness, and bestiality, with which they connected all sorcery and divination. They insisted on a broad and firm sex taboo and denounced sacral harlotry and child sacrifice together. It must be remembered that the peoples of that age generally regarded sex usages which seem to us the most abominable as trivial, unworthy of notice, matters of personal liberty and choice. Brahmins, a century ago, held that view of pederasty.1985 The prophets also set in opposition to their own traditional ritual religion a doctrine of righteousness, by which religion was made ethical. It was a marvelous product for an insignificant hill people. It is, however, to be noticed that in the Zend-Avesta there was also a great revolt against sex vice.1986

613. How the Jewish view of sensuality came to prevail. The religious system of the Jewish prophets never has become the actual popular religion of any people. The Old Testament contains the story of the protests and failures of the prophets. Their work did not issue from the mores of the Jewish nation, and did not influence the mores before the captivity. The prophets were trying to introduce a new world philosophy by virtue of its ethical value and by interpretations of current political history. In Jer. xliv we see the latter argument turned against the prophet. The people cite their own experience. When they served the Queen of Heaven they fared well. 559In the rabbinical period the Jews emphasized everything which could differentiate them from heathen, and in the New Testament we find that idolatry and sensuality are presented as the two great heathen characteristics which Christians are to avoid. It is impossible for us to know to what extent the mores of the masses, in the western Roman empire, were marked by the ancient Roman austerity in the sex mores. It is, however, reasonable to believe that the ancient mores prevailed most in the class amongst whom Christian converts were found. Salvianus also gives to the German nations very remarkable testimony as to their freedom from sensuality and sex vice. The experience of societies also went to prove that such vice can corrupt the finest brain and the most cultivated character; also that, if it becomes current in a society, as pederasty and prostitution did in the Greco-Roman world, it will eat out all manly virtues, all coöperative devotion, the love of children, the energy of invention and production, of an entire population. Thus by the syncretism of the mores of the nations, and by experience, the conviction was produced that the view of sensuality and sex vice which the Jewish prophets taught was true, and that that view was the most important part of the mores and of religion for the welfare of mankind.

1885 Snouck-Hurgronje, De Atjehers, I, 64-66; Bur. Eth., XVIII, 285; Amer. Anthrop., XI, 56; Codrington, Melanesians, 102, 299; Serpa Pinto, Como eu Atravassei Africa, I, 82; Kubary, Karolinenarchipel., 47, 226, 244; Powers, Calif. Indians, 24.

1886 Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 141.

1887 Barton, Semitic Origins, 78.

1888 Wellsted, Arabia, II, 12.

1889 Proc. Soc. Bibl. Archeol., 1890, XII, 383.

1890 Herodotus, I, 193.

1891 Wilken, Volkenkunde, 550.

1892 Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 576, 589.

1893 Amer. Jo. Semit. Lang. and Lit., XV, 201.

1894 Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 156.

1895 Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 150.

1896 Ibid., 183.

1897 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 447.

1898 Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6.

1899 Herodotus, I, 93, 181, 199.

1900 Globus, LXXXVI, 360.

1901 Maurer, Völkerkunde, Bibel, und Christenthum, 95.

1902 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 56-59.

1903 Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 50, 126.

1904 Archiv f. Religionsgesch., VII, 88.

1905 Priester und Tempel im Hellen. Aeg., I, 316.

1906 Valer., Max., II, 6, 15.

1907 Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6; Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 229.

1908 De Civit. Dei, II, 4.

1909 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 56.

1910 Ibid.

1911 Strabo, XI, 14, 16.

1912 Num. xxiii. 28; xxv. 1; Josh. xxii. 17.

1913 Die Lustseuche im Alterthum, 77.

1914 1 Kings xv. 12.

1915 1 Kings xiv. 24.

1916 1 Kings xxii. 46; 2 Kings xxiii. 7.

1917 Deut. xxiii. 18.

1918 Cults of the Greek States, 635.

1919 Athenæus; XII, 11.

1920 Cults of the Greek States, 641.

1921 II, 3, 20.

1922 Globus, LXXV, 286.

1923 Scripta Hist. Islandorum, II, 67.

1924 Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific Coast, I, 123; II, 676.

1925 Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 138, 150.

1926 Oliveira Martins, As Racas Humanas, II, 181.

1927 Burckhardt, Arabic Proverbs, 145.

1928 Laws, I, 5.

1929 Monier-Williams, Brahmanism and Hinduism, 181-183.

1930 Dubois, Mœurs de l'Inde, I, 434-439; 478-480; II, 353, 366, 370, 377.

1931 Wilkins, Modern Hinduism, 94, 216, 290; Monier-Williams, Brahmanism and Hinduism, 451.

1932 Wilkins, 242.

1933 Jo. Roy. As. Soc., 1841, 239; Wilkins, 286.

1934 Wilkins, 235.

1935 Ibid., 317.

1936 Ibid., 216.

1937 Monier-Williams, 185, 190.

1938 JASB, I, 477; III, 200; JAI, XXVI, 341; Monier-Williams, 87; Hopkins, Relig. of India, 491.

1939 Hopkins, Relig. of India, 456; JASB, I, 477, 492; III, 201.

1940 JASB, II, 322, 349; cf. JASB, I, 502.

1941 Monier-Williams, 254.

1942 Nivedita, Web of Indian Life, 212.

1943 Nivedita, 212.

1944 Monier-Williams, 78, 183, 224.

1945 Dubois, I, 439.

1946 Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific Coast, II, 336; III, 377.

1947 Ibid., II, 676.

1948 Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 153, 158, 164.

1949 Ibid., 173.

1950 Petri, Anthropology (russ.), 435.

1951 Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 169.

1952 Globus, LXXXVII, 130.

1953 Oliphant, China and Japan, II, 494.

1954 Vererbung und Auslese, 200.

1955 Tiele-Gehrich, Relig. in Alterthume, I, 169.

1956 Herod., I, 199; Hosea iv. 14; W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 454.

1957 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 141.

1958 Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific Coast, II, 305, 308-309.

1959 Schrader, Prehist. Antiq. of the Aryans, 422.

1960 Hopkins, Relig. of India, 363, 450.

1961 Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 680.

1962 Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 123.

1963 Relig. of the Semites, 365.

1964 Ibid., 366, 375.

1965 Cf. Deut. xviii. 10; 2 Kings xvi. 3; xxi. 6.

1966 Levit. xviii. 21; Deut. xviii. 10. Molech is a false word. It has the consonants of the word for "king" and the vowels of the word for "shameful thing" (W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 67).

1967 2 Kings xvi. 3; xvii. 7; xxi. 6; xxiii. 10.

1968 Ex. xxii. 29.

1969 Ex. xxxiv. 20.

1970 Num. xviii. 15.

1971 Ex. iv. 24.

1972 Jer. xxxii. 35; Ezek. xx. 26, 31. According to 2 Chron. xxviii. 3, Ahaz offered his son in the stress of war (Hastings, Dict. of the Bible, Relig. of Israel).

1973 Globus, LXXXVI, 321.

1974 Globus, LXXXVI, 117-119.

1975 Possibly 2 Kings iii. 27; 2 Chron. xxviii. 3; Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 167.

1976 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 465.

1977 Ibid., 370.

1978 Tiele-Gehrich, Relig. im Alterthum, I, 212, 240; Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 680; Sanchuniathon apud Euseb., Prep. Evang., I, 10.

1979 Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 229.

1980 Tertullian, Apol., 9.

1981 Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 222.

1982 Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6.

1983 De Gubernat. Dei, VII, 72-77; cf. VII, 15-16, 27, 86, 97-100.

1984 Barton, Semitic Origins, 300.

1985 Dubois, Mœurs de l'Inde, 439.

1986 Darmstetter, Zend-Avesta, I, 100, 102.

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