Sex And Sex Worship

Otto Augustus Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317846314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sex is at the very heart of life, and this classic illustrated study of sex, its nature and function, and its influence on art, science, architecture and religion contains a wealth of information on sex beliefs, practices and worship in other cultures and periods of history stretching back to ancient times. Drawing on a wide range of sources including private collections of erotica, Wall shows how people in other times and places have dealt with the timeless themes of sexuality, male, female, love, passion, lust, desire and worship, dealing with sex as a private practice and also as public celebration.

This edition first published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

SOCIAL RELATIONS OP MEN AND WOMEN

It is sometimes stated that the institution of marriage, the relationship of husband and wife, is the original form of sexual relationship, introduced by God when he created Adam, and then created a helpmate for him.

But in reality married relationship is a rather late institution, introduced when man had advanced far enough to appreciate the crudeness and coarseness of his evolutionary inheritance in this regard.

We have already learned that mankind was the product of evolution from mammals, and not from the higher apes, but as a collateral branch to these. Like our domestic animals, cattle, horses, goats, sheep, dogs, etc., who resulted by evolution from the same sources from which man sprang, when this evolution was taking place in regard to man's body, he inherited with his physical characteristics also many of the mental traits of his pre-human ancestors. It is a characteristic of most herbivorous mam-mals that they do not pair, as many birds and many carnivorous animals do, but that they live in a promiscuous relationship of the sexes, or that they go in droves or flocks of many females attached to one male. These two methods of sexual relationships were probably the primitive methods of men and women living together.

Whenever civilized travelers have visited savage nations for the first time, they found in most cases the tribal organization not based on marriage, but that the men and women of the tribe lived together in promiscuous relationship which seemed to be subject to no regulation, but only to the immediate and temporary inclination of the individual man and woman. In other words, the family as it exists in civilized communities, was unknown in most of the lower nations; and presumably also in primitive conditions of the higher nations.

In such unregulated relationship it is of course impossible to determine the paternal ancestry, and only the relation of the mother to the child is known. Under such conditions, it was impossible even for a woman to know with any degree of certainty who was the father.

This led to tribal or horde organization, in which relationship and inheritance was traced through the mother only, and some authors think that, by analogy, the earliest deities were supposed to be living together in similar manner and that this led to an exaltation of the mother over the unknown father, and that the first ideas of deities were of feminine deities; that motherhood was deified.

This is probably true, and family-relationship of gods and goddesses, and of men and women, was not known to primitive tribes who lived by hunting and fishing, and who had no permanent homes. In such people women and children belonged to the tribe; they were community property.

Herodotus tells us of a Scythian people who held their women as common property, “that they might all be brothers.”

Suidas relates that the women in Attica abandoned themselves to unchecked vice, and no man knew his father.

An ancient Hindu work says, that Svetaketu instituted mar-riage, and that “before his time women were unconfined and roamed at their pleasure.”

The Chinese also believe that marriage was introduced by teaching. Fo-hi, a semi-mythical king of China, supposed to have been born of a virgin, put an end to promiscuous relations by introducing social order, marriage, writing and music. Other nations had similar traditions about the introduction of married relationship.

Aristotle and other ancient writers reported similar condi-tions elsewhere; and such customs exist in many places to this day.

In many Polynesian islands promiscuous intercourse between the sexes prevailed until the natives were converted by the missionaries; or they prevail to this day where they have not been converted. In fact, the effort to limit a man to one woman has been one of the greatest obstacles to the influence of the missionaries in some of these islands.

In some of the islands female virtue was highly prized and Samoa was pre-eminent in this respect. A woman when about to be married had to undergo a special ordeal to prove her virginity, and a proof of her immorality disgraced all her relatives.

In other islands great laxity of morals was the rule. In Ha-waii brothers with their wives, and sisters with their husbands, possessed each other in common; and in some of the islands, es-pecially among the chiefs, brothers and sisters intermarried.

On the other hand, in some quite low tribes, morality was high. In the Andaman Islands the people go absolutely naked, except that women in quite recent times have commenced to wear aprons of grass behind; yet a fairly strict monogamy is the rule, and transgressions are the exception. They name their children before birth; all names are therefore of common gender, and there are only about 20 names, but the different names are usually qualified by adjectives.

In Burmah monogamy is the rule, but husbands can rent or lease their wives to strangers for a stated period; this is not con-sidered degrading to the woman, who is generally true to her tem-porary husband or master.

In East India, in early times, the Aryan housewife shared with the husband the joys and the trials, as well as the privileges of worshipping the gods; she even took part in composing the hymns to the gods, and some of the finest of these were composed by prophetesses.

The Niam-Niam tribe in Africa, who are cannibals, have a genuine affection for their wives, such as does not exist in any other African tribe; if a man's wife is captured or stolen, those who hold her can get almost anything from the husband, such as ivory, etc., in exchange for her liberty.

In ancient Germany a youth married the girl of his choice. The husband presented the wife with arms which she could use in emergencies. They were monogamous, except that the princes or chiefs sometimes married the daughters of several chiefs for political reasons. This continued far into civilized times, in fact, to the days of Luther. About 750 A.D. the Germans were very corrupt, and the sanctity of marriage was almost disregarded. About this time the Saxons were still Pagans and offered human sacrifices to their gods. They also married their sisters.

Among the Sawaioris women occupied a high position and could even hold hereditary offices or positions in the tribe.

The Eskimos are very filthy; owing to the intense cold in winter, washing is out of the question. Mothers sometimes wash their children by licking them off with their tongues, like cows do their calves; they are monogamous, a man having but one wife; but the women especially are very low in their estimate of chastity, and their husbands and relatives practically ignore any moral lapses on the part of the wives.

In parts of Alaska, among the Aleuts, the women go to meet incoming ships, and earn money by associating with the sailors; this is considered by the husbands to be a perfectly proper and commendable way to contribute to the household maintenance.

A curious story is told of the Lacedemonians who in a war (3209: B.C.) had sworn not to return to their native land until they had taken Messina; this took longer than they had anticipated, and at the end of ten years they were still at war. Their wives then sent them word to return home and beget children with their wives and the daughters who had meanwhile grown up. So the Lacedemonians sent a picked number of robust warriors to impregnate all the women at home; as many of these were young women, or virgins, all the children born of this visit of the delegation were called parthenios, or virgin-children.

In later days the Greeks frequently invited especially beautiful young men to cohabit with their wives and daughters so as to have the latter bear beautiful children; this was considered eminently proper and did not injure the reputations of the women to any degree whatever.

When Cook and his crew visited the Hawaiian islands for the first time, they found promiscuous intercourse the rule; they joined in, but as some of the sailors had syphilis this disease soon became general, and this was the cause of a great deterioration in the native stock.

Fig. 62.—“The Family,” the unit and foundation of civilized society.

Efforts have been frequently made, even in highly civilized lands, to reintroduce this promiscuous relationship, but while it exists sub rosa in all lands, it has not met with official recognition.

During the French Kevolution efforts were made to take the ownership of all women and girls from the king and from those to whom he had leased his rights in them, and to vest it in the state. The state was to lease the women to the men, for breeding purposes, and to be their maids (the ideas of canonical law being accepted).

Fournier, a French socialist, proposed to reorganize society; he believed that the institution of marriage imposes unnatural restraints on human nature, which results in vice and misery, and that the full and free development of human nature, and the only way to happiness and virtue, depends on the unrestrained indulgence of human passion. He proposed that those who desired to cohabit should take out licenses, good for a certain limited time, which would permit them to do so.

Such a system, under religious sanction, actually exists in modern Persia, where temporary marriages for a few hours or for a few days only, can be arranged for by the mollah (Mohammedan priest) who receives a part of the money paid by the man to his temporary wife. This is, of course, merely prostitution, but it is camouflaged by a religious setting, and thereby saved from being a moral lapse.

About 1830 Enfantin proposed that the “tyranny of marriage” should be abolished in France, and that a system of “free love” take its place.

In 1848 the idea was again brought forward in the legislative body in France, when it was demanded that a law should be passed declaring all women and children to be the property of the state, and providing regulations for leasing the women to the men for certain periods of time as household maids or housekeepers and for breeding purposes.

To a certain extent this effort to reintroduce promiscuous or primitive tribe and horde relationship was actually carried out in France during the Eevolution. A premium was paid to the mothers of illegitimate children, who were called “les enfants de la patrie;” it was forbidden to make any inquiries in regard to the paternity of such children, but the seeking out the mothers of abandoned children was permitted.

The tendency of men of the lower classes, when a revolution gives them temporary power, to revert to similar ideas, is shown by the following report:

LONDON, Oct. 26, 1918.—Russian maidens under the jurisdiction of certain provincial Bolshevik Soviets become the “property of the state” when they reach the age of 18 and are compelled to register at a government “bureau of free love,” according to the official gazette of the Vladimir Soviet of Workers arid Soldiers' Deputies, which recently published the Soviet's decree on the subject.

Under the decree a woman having registered “has the right to choose from among men between 19 and 50 “a cohabitant husb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Sex
• Modern Religions
• Other Beliefs
• How Old Is Mankind
• Nature of Sex
• Status of Woman
• Cosmogonies
• Gemetria
• Bible of the Greeks
• Sex in Plants and Totemism
• Sex in Animals and Mankind
• Light on a Dark Subject
• Social Relations of Men and Women
• Art and Ethics
• Art Anatomy
• Credulity
• Origin of Religious Ideas
• Primitive Beliefs
• Sexual Relationships of the Gods
• Phallic Worship
• Plant Worship
• Animal Worship
• Some of the Gods
• The Eternal Feminine
• About Goddesses
• Sexual Union Among Deities
• Serpent Worship
• Worship of Heavenly Bodies
• Phallic Festivals
• Water
• Is There an Immortal Soul?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• General Index