Love's Coming-of-Age: A series of papers on the relations of the sexes

by Edward Carpenter

THE FREE SOCIETY

Taking, finally, a somewhat wider outlook over the whole subject of the most intimate human relations than was feasible in the foregoing chapters, we may make a few general remarks.

One of the great difficulties in the way of arriving at any general understanding on questions of sex—and one which we have already had occasion to note—is the extraordinary diversity of feeling and temperament which exists in these matters. Needless to say, this is increased by the reserve, natural or artificial, which so seldom allows people to express their sentiments quite freely. In the great ocean there are so many currents, cold and warm, fresh, and salt, and brackish; and each one thinks that the current in which he lives is the whole ocean. The man of the world hardly understands, certainly does not sympathize with, the recluse or ascetic—and the want of appreciation is generally returned; the maternal, the sexual, and the philanthropic woman, are all somewhat unintelligible to each other; the average male and the average female approach the great passion from totally different sides, and are continually at odds over it; and again both of these great sections of humanity fail entirely to understand that other and well-marked class of persons whose love-attraction is (inborn) towards their own sex, and indeed hardly recognize the existence of such a class, although as a matter of fact it is a large and important one in every community. In fact, all these differences have hitherto been so little the subject of impartial study that we are still amazingly in the dark about them.

When we look back to History, and the various customs of the world in different races and tribes and at different periods of time, we seem to see these natural divergencies of human temperament reflected in the extraordinary diversity of practices that have obtained and been recognized. We see that, in some cases, the worship of sex took its place beside the worship of the gods; and—what appears equally strange—that the orgiastic rites and saturnalia of the early world were intimately connected with religious feeling; we find that, in other cases, asceticism and chastity and every denial of the flesh were glorified and looked upon as providing the only way to the heavenly kingdom; we discover that marriage has been instituted and defined and sanctioned in endless forms, each looked upon as the only moral and possible form in its own time and country; and that the position of women under these different conditions has varied in the most remarkable way—that in some of the primitive societies where group-marriages[^[20]] of one kind or another prevailed their dignity and influence were of the highest, that under some forms of Monogamy, as among the Nagas of Bengal,[^[21]] women have been abjectly degraded, while under other forms, as in Ancient Egypt and the later Roman Empire, they have been treated with respect; and so forth. We cannot fail, I say, to recognize the enormous diversity of practice which has existed over the world in this matter of the relations of the sexes; nor, I may add, can we venture—if we possess any sense of humanity—to put our finger down finally on any one custom or institution, and say, Here alone is the right way.

On the contrary, it seems to me probable that, broadly speaking, a really free Society will accept and make use of all that has gone before. If, as we have suggested, historical forms and customs are the indication of tendencies and instincts which still exist among us, then the question is, not the extinction of these tendencies, but the finding of the right place and really rational expression for them. That the various customs of past social life do subsist on beneath the surface of modern society, we know well enough; and it seems likely that society in the future will have to recognize and to a certain extent transform these. In fact, in recognizing it will inevitably transform, for it will bring them out from darkness into light, and from the old conditions and surroundings of the past societies into the new conditions of the modern. Polygamy, for instance, or some related form of union, supposing it really did spontaneously and naturally arise in a society which gave perfect freedom and independence to women in their relation to men, would be completely different in character from the old-world polygamy, and would cease to act as a degrading influence on women, since it would be the spontaneous expression of their attachment to each other and to a common husband; Monogamy, under similar circumstances, would lose its narrowness and stuffiness; and the life of the Hetaira, that is of the woman who chooses to be the companion of more than one man, might not be without dignity, honor, and sincere attachment.

Again it is easy to see, if the sense of cleanness in sex ever does come in, if the physical body ever becomes clean (which it certainly is not now-a-days), clean and beautiful and accepted, within and without—and this of course it can only be through a totally changed method of life, through pure and clean food, nakedness to a large extent, and a kind of saturation with the free air and light of heaven; and if the mental and moral relation ever becomes clean, which can only be with the freedom of woman and the sincerity of man, and so forth; it is easy to see how entirely all this would alter our criticism of the various sex-relations, and our estimate of their place and fitness.

In the wild and even bacchanalian festivals of all the earlier nations, there was an element of Nature-sex-mysticism which has become lost in modern times, or quite unclean and depraved; yet we cannot but see that this element is a vital and deep-lying one in humanity, and in some form or other will probably reassert itself. On the other hand, in the Monkish and other ascetic movements of Christian or pre-Christian times, with their efforts towards a proud ascendancy over the body, there was (commonly sneered at though it may be in the modern West) an equally vital and important truth,[^[22]] which will have to be rehabilitated. The practices of former races and times, however anomalous they may sometimes appear to us, were after all in the main the expression of needs and desires which had their place in human nature, and which still for the most part have their place there, even though overlaid and suppressed beneath existing convention; and who knows, in all the stifled longings of thousands and thousands of hearts, how the great broad soul of Humanity—which reaches to and accepts all times and races—is still ever asserting herself and swelling against the petty bonds of this or that age? The nearer Society comes to its freedom and majority the more lovingly will it embrace this great soul within it, and recognizing in all the customs of the past the partial efforts of that soul to its own fulfillment will refuse to deny them, but rather seek, by acceptance and reunion, to transform and illumine them all.

Possibly, to some, these remarks will only suggest a return to general confusion and promiscuity; and of course to such people they will seem inconsistent with what has been said before on the subject of the real Marriage and the tendency of human beings, as society evolves, to seek more and more sincerely a life-long union with their chosen mate; but no one who thinks twice about the matter could well make this mistake. For the latter tendency, that namely “from confusion to distinction,” is in reality the tendency of all evolution, and cannot be set aside. It is in the very nature of Love that as it realizes its own aim it should rivet always more and more towards a durable and distinct relationship, nor rest till the permanent mate and equal is found. As human beings progress their relations to each other must become much more definite and distinct instead of less so—and there is no likelihood of society in its onward march lapsing backward, so to speak, to formlessness again.

But it is just the advantage of this onward movement towards definiteness that it allows—as in the evolution of all organic life—of more and more differentiation as the life rises higher in the scale of existence. If society should at any future time recognize—as we think likely it will do—the variety of needs of the human heart and of human beings, it will not therefore confuse them, but will see that these different needs indicate different functions, all of which may have their place and purpose. If it has the good sense to tolerate a Nature-festival now and then, and a certain amount of animalism let loose, it will not be so foolish as to be unable to distinguish this from the deep delight and happiness of a permanent spiritual mating; or if it recognizes in some case, a woman’s temporary alliance with a man for the sake of obtaining a much-needed child, it will not therefore be so silly as to mark her down for life as a common harlot. It will allow in fact that there are different forms and functions of the love-sentiment, and while really believing that a life-long comradeship (possibly with little of the sexual in it) is the most satisfying form, will see that a cast-iron Marriage-custom which, as to-day, expects two people either to live eternally in the same house and sit on opposite sides of the same table, or else to be strangers to each other—and which only recognizes two sorts of intimacy, orthodox and criminal, wedded and adulterous—is itself the source of perpetual confusion and misapprehension.

No doubt the Freedom of Society in this sense, and the possibility of a human life which shall be the fluid and ever-responsive embodiment of true Love in all its variety of manifestation, goes with the Freedom of Society in the economic sense. When mankind has solved the industrial problem so far that the products of our huge mechanical forces have become a common heritage, and no man or woman is the property-slave of another, then some of the causes which compel prostitution, property-marriage, and other perversions of affection, will have disappeared; and in such economically free society human unions may at last take place according to their own inner and true laws.

Hitherto we have hardly thought whether there were any inner laws or not; our thoughts have been fixed on the outer; and the Science of Love, if it may so be called, has been strangely neglected. Yet if, putting aside for a moment all convention and custom, one will look quietly within himself, he will perceive that there are most distinct and inviolable inner forces, binding him by different ties to different people, and with different and inevitable results according to the quality and the nature of the affection bestowed—that there is in fact in that world of the heart a kind of cosmical harmony and variety, and an order almost astronomical.

This is noticeably true of what may be called the planetary law of distances in the relation of people to one another. For of some of the circle of one’s acquaintance it may be said that one loves them cordially at a hundred miles’ distance; of others that they are dear friends at a mile; while others again are indispensable far nearer than that. If by any chance the friend whose planetary distance is a mile is forced into closer quarters, the only result is a violent development of repulsion and centrifugal force, by which probably he is carried even beyond his normal distance, till such time as he settles down into his right place; while on the other hand if we are separated for a season from one who by right is very near and who we know belongs to us, we can bide our time, knowing that the forces of return will increase with the separation. How marked and definite these personal distances are may be gathered from considering how largely the art of life consists in finding and keeping them, and how much trouble arises from their confusion, and from the way in which we often only find them out after much blundering and suffering and mutual recrimination.

So marked indeed are these and other such laws that they sometimes suggest that there really is a cosmic world of souls, to which we all belong—a world of souls whose relations are eternal and clearly-defined; and that our terrestrial relations are merely the working-out and expression of far antecedent and unmodifiable facts—an idea which for many people is corroborated by the curious way in which, often at the very first sight, they become aware of their exact relation to a new-comer. In some cases this brings with it a strange sense of previous intimacy, hard to, explain; and in other cases, not so intimate, it still will seem to fix almost instantaneously the exact propinquity of the relation—so that though in succeeding years, or even decades of years, the mutual acquaintanceship may work itself out with all sorts of interesting and even unexpected developments and episodes, yet this mean distance does not vary during the whole time, so to speak, by a single hair’s breadth.

Is it possible, we may ask (in the light of such experiences), that there really is a Free Society in another and deeper sense than that hitherto suggested—a society to which we all in our inmost selves consciously or unconsciously belong—the Rose of souls that Dante beheld in Paradise, whose every petal is an individual, and an individual only through its union with all the rest—the early Church’s dream, of an eternal Fellowship in heaven and on earth—the Prototype of all the brotherhoods and communities that exist on this or any planet; and that the innumerable selves of men, united in the one Self, members of it and of one another (like the members of the body) stand in eternal and glorious relationship bound indissolubly together? We know of course that the reality of things cannot be adequately expressed by such phrases as these, or by any phrases, yet possibly some such conception comes as near the truth as any one conception can; and, making use of it, we may think that our earthly relations are a continual attempt—through much blindness and ineffectualness and failure—to feel after and to find these true and permanent relations to others.

Surely in some subtle way if one person sincerely love another, heart and soul, that other becomes a part of the lover, indissolubly wrought into his being.[^[23]] Mentally the two grow and become compact together. No thought that the lover thinks, no scene that he looks on, but the impress of his loved one in some way is on it—so that as long as he exists (here or anywhere) with his most intimate self that other is threaded and twined inseparable. So clinging is the relation. Perhaps in the outer world we do not always see such relations quite clear, and we think when death or other cause removes the visible form from us that the hour of parting has come. But in the inner world it is clear enough, and we divine that we and our mate are only two little petals that grow near each other on the great Flower of Eternity; and that it is because we are near each other in that unchanging world, that in the world of change our mortal selves are drawn together, and will be drawn always, wherever and whenever they may meet.

But since the petals of the immortal Flower are by myriads and myriads, so have we endless lessons of soul-relationship to learn—some most intimate, others doubtless less so, but all fair and perfect—so soon as we have discovered what these relationships really are, and are in no confusion of mind about them. For even those that are most distant are desirable, and have the germ of love in them, so soon as they are touched by the spirit of Truth (which means the fearless statement of the life which is in us, in poise against the similar statement of life in others); since, indeed, the spirit of Truth is the life of the whole, and only the other side of that Love which binds the whole together.

Looking at things in this light it would seem to us that the ideal of terrestrial society for which we naturally strive is that which would embody best these enduring and deep-seated relations of human souls; and that every society, as far as it is human and capable of holding together, is in its degree a reflection of the celestial City. Never is the essential, real, Society quite embodied in any mundane Utopia, but ever through human history is it working unconsciously in the midst of mortal affairs and impelling towards an expression of itself.

At any rate, and however all this may be, the conclusion is that the inner laws in these matters—the inner laws of the sex-passion, of love, and of all human relationship—must gradually appear and take the lead, since they alone are the powers which can create and uphold a rational society; and that the outer laws—since they are dead and lifeless things—must inevitably disappear. Real love is only possible in the freedom of society; and freedom is only possible when love is a reality. The subjection of sex-relations to legal conventions is an intolerable bondage, but of course it is a bondage inescapable as long as people are slaves to a merely physical desire. The two slaveries in fact form a sort of natural counterpoise, the one to the other. When love becomes sufficient of a reality to hold the sex-passion as its powerful yet willing servant, the absurdity of Law will be at an end.

Surely it is not too much to suppose that a reasonable society will be capable of seeing these and other such things; that it will neither on the one hand submit to a cast-iron system depriving it of all grace and freedom of movement, nor on the other hand be in danger of falling into swamps of promiscuity; but that it will have the sense to recognize and establish the innumerable and delicate distinctions of relation which build up the fabric of a complex social organism. It will understand perhaps that sincere Love is, as we have said, a real fact and its own justification, and that however various or anomalous or unusual may be the circumstances and combinations under which it appears, it demands and has to be treated by society with the utmost respect and reverence—as a law unto itself, probably the deepest and most intimate law of human life, which only in the most exceptional cases, if at all, may public institutions venture to interfere with.

In all these matters it is surprising to-day what children we are—how we take the innumerable flowers and try to snip and shape all their petals and leaves to one sorry pattern, or how with a kind of grossness we snatch at and destroy in a few moments the bloom and beauty which are rightfully undying. Perhaps it will only be for a society more fully grown than ours to understand the wealth and variety of affectional possibilities which it has within itself, and the full enchantment of the many relations in which the romance of love by a tender discrimination and aesthetic continence is preserved for years and decades of years in, as it were, a state of evergrowing perfection.

SOME REMARKS
on the
EARLY STAR and SEX WORSHIPS

There seems to be a certain propriety in the fact that two of the oldest and most universal cults have been the worship of the stars on the one hand, and of the emblems of sex on the other. The stars, the most abstract, distant and universal of phenomena, symbols of changeless law and infinitude, before which human will and passion sink into death and nothingness, and sex, the very focus of passion and desire, the burning point of the will to live; between these two poles the human mind has swayed since the eldest time.

With these earlier worships, too, the later religions have mingled in inextricable but not meaningless entanglement. The Passover, the greatest feast of the Jews, borrowed from the Egyptians, handed down to become the supreme festival of Christianity, and finally blending in the North of Europe with the worship of the Norse goddess Eastre, is as is well known closely connected with the celebration of the Spring equinox and of the passing over of the sun from south to north of the equator—i. e., from his winter depression to his summer dominion. The Sun, at the moment of passing the equinoctial point, stood 3,000 years ago in the Zodiacal constellation of the Ram or he-lamb. The Lamb, therefore, became the symbol of the young triumphant god. The Israelites (Exodus xii. 14) were to smear their doorways (symbol of the passage from darkness to light) with the blood of the Lamb, in remembrance of the conflict of their god with the powers of darkness (the Egyptians). At an earlier date—owing to the precession of the equinoxes—the sun at the spring passage stood in the constellation of the Bull; so, in the older worships of Egypt and of Persia and of India, it was the Bull that was sacred and the symbol of the god. Moses is said to have abolished the worship of the Calf and to have consecrated the Lamb at the passover—and this appears to be a rude record of the fact that the astronomical changes were accompanied or followed by priestly changes of ceremonial. Certainly it is curious that in later Egyptian times the bull-headed god was deposed in favor of the ram-headed god Ammon; and that Christianity adopted the Lamb for the symbol of its Savior. Similarly, the Virgin Mary with the holy Child in her arms can be traced by linear descent from the early Christian Church at Alexandria up through the later Egyptian times to Isis with the infant Horus, and thence to the constellation Virgo shining in the sky. In the representation of the Zodiac in the Temple of Denderah (in Egypt) the figure of Virgo is annotated by a smaller figure of Isis with Horus in her arms; and the Roman church fixed the celebration of Mary’s assumption into glory at the very date (15th August) of the said constellation’s disappearance from sight in the blaze of the solar rays, and her birth on the date (8th Sept.) of the same constellation’s reappearance.[^[24]]

The history of Israel reveals a long series of avowedly sexual and solar worships carried on alongside with that of Jehovah—worships of Baal, Ashtaroth, Nehushtan, the Host of Heaven, etc.—and if we are to credit the sacred record, Moses himself introduced the notoriously sexual Tree and Serpent worship (Numbers xxi. 9, and 2 Kings xviii. 4); while Solomon, not without dramatic propriety, borrowed from the Phoenicians the two phallic pillars surmounted by pomegranate wreaths, called Jachin and Boaz, and placed them in front of his temple (1 Kings vii. 21). The Cross itself (identical as a symbol with the phallus of the Greeks and the lingam of the East), the Fleur de Lys, which has the same signification, and the Crux Ansata, borrowed by the early Christians from Egypt and indicating the union of male and female, are woven and worked into the priestly vestments and altar-cloths of Christianity, just as the astronomical symbols are woven and worked into its Calendar, and both sets of symbols, astronomical and sexual, into the very construction of our Churches and Cathedrals. Jesus himself—so entangled is the worship of this greatest man with the earlier cults—is purported[^[25]] to have been born like the other sun-gods, Bacchus, Apollo, Osiris, on the 25th day of December, the day of the sun’s re-birth (i. e., the first day which obviously lengthens after the 21st of December—the day of the doubting apostle Thomas!) and to have died upon an instrument which, as already hinted, was ages before and all over the world held in reverence as a sexual symbol.

I have only touched the fringe of this great subject. The more it is examined into the more remarkable is the mass of corroborative matter belonging to it. The conclusion towards which one seems to be impelled is that these two great primitive ideas, sexual and astronomical, are likely to remain the poles of human emotion in the future, even as they have been in the past.

Some cynic has said that the two great ruling forces of mankind are Obscenity and Superstition. Put in a less paradoxical form, as that the two ruling forces are Sex and the belief in the Unseen, the saying may perhaps be accepted. To call the two Love and Faith (as Dr. Bucke does in his excellent book on “Man’s Moral Nature”) is perhaps to run the risk of becoming too abstract and spiritual.

Roughly speaking we may say that the worship of Sex and Life characterized the Pagan races of Europe and Asia Minor anterior to Christianity, while the worship of Death and the Unseen has characterized Christianity. It remains for the modern nations to accept both Life and Death, both the Greek and the Hebrew elements, and all that these general terms denote, in a spirit of the fullest friendliness and sanity and fearlessness.

A curious part of all the old religions, Pagan or Christian—and this connects itself with the above—is Asceticism: that occasional instinct of voluntary and determined despite to the body and its senses. Even in the wildest races, rejoicing before all things in the consciousness of Life, we find festivals of fierce endurance and torments willingly undergone with a kind of savage glee;[^[26]] and during the Christian centuries—monks, mystics, and world-spiting puritans—this instinct was sometimes exalted into the very first place of honor. I suppose it will have to be recognized—whatever absurd aberrations the tendency may have been liable to—that it is a basic thing in human nature, and as ineradicable in its way as the other equally necessary instinct towards Pleasure. To put it in another way, perhaps the ordinary Hedonism makes a mistake in failing to recognize the joy of Ascendancy, and (if it is not a “bull” to say so) the pleasure which lies in the denial of pleasure. In order to enjoy life one must be a master of life—for to be a slave to its inconsistencies can only mean torment: and in order to enjoy the senses one must be master of them. To dominate the actual world you must, like Archimedes, base your fulcrum somewhere beyond.

In such moods a man delights to feel his supremacy, not only over the beasts of the field, but over his own bodily and mental powers: no ordinary pleasure so great, but its rejection serves to throw out into relief this greater; no task so stern, but endurance is sterner; no pain so fierce but it wakes the soul to secret laughter. If there is something narrow in the creed of the ascetic on its negative side—that of denial—one cannot but feel that on its positive side, the establishment of authority and kingship, it has a real and vital meaning.

In another mood, however (equally undeniable and important), man acknowledges his delight in life, and gives the rein to his desires to chariot him to the extremest bounds of his kingdom. The kiss of the senses is beautiful beyond all and every abstraction; the touch of the sunlight, the glory of form and color, the magic of sweet sound, the joy of human embraces, the passion of sex—all so much the more perfect because they are as it were something divine made actual and realizable. In such a mood asceticism in any form seems the grossest impiety and folly, and the pursuit of the Unseen a mere abandonment of the world for its shadow.

Are not these two moods both necessary—the great rhythmical heart-beat, the systole and diastole, of the human soul? The one, a going forth and gathering of materials from all sources, the other an organizing of them under the most perfect light, or rather (it may be said) a consumption of them to feed the most perfect flame; the one centrifugal, the other centripetal; the one individual, the other universal; and so forth—each required for the purposes of the other, and making the other possible?

Do we not want a truly experiential view of what may be called Religion—derived from the largest actual acquaintance with, and acceptance of, all the facts both of mundane and extra-mundane consciousness—neither (like some secularists) denying the one, nor (like some religionists) minimizing or contemning the other? And is it not possible that in the early Star and Sex worships we have evidence of the attempt of the human mind to establish some such sane polarity?

NOTE
ON THE PRIMITIVE GROUP-MARRIAGE

One of the early forms of union among human beings appears to have been that of the Group-marriage, which was an alliance between a group of men and a group of women. It had various forms, but rested in general on the fact that the women in primitive societies did not, on marriage, leave their parental habitation but remained there and were visited by the men—by one man first, who would come with presents of game, etc., from the chase, and would afterwards bring his “brothers” or friends. Thus in general a group of “brothers” would come into relation with a group of “sisters.” In such a state of society, however, it is obvious that parentage would be very uncertain, and the terms brother and sister would not always have the stricter meanings which we give them. Such a group-marriage was the “Punalua” or “friend” marriage of Morgan’s North American Indians; which is also supposed by Marx and Engels to have prevailed at an early time throughout Polynesia. See Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society” and Friedrich Engels’ “Ursprung der Familie.”

In later times the group-marriage became restricted in various directions, according to the genius of various races—marriage of cousins, for instance, being severely prohibited among some barbaric tribes, while among others all relatives (in the maternal line) were barred. Thus ultimately, in some quarters, sprang up a Pair-marriage; which however was only loosely defined; which had much of the old group-marriage lingering round it; and in which the children still belonged to the woman, and descent was traced in the maternal line only.

Under these conditions of society the woman was comparatively well off. Remaining as she did in her own gens or clan and among her own relations, and the husband being as it were a visitor from the outside, she was by no means subject to him; in fact, in order to gain access, he had to make himself agreeable not only to her but to her own family! She had the disposal of the children; there was no danger of their being sequestrated to her husband; and whatever little property she had she could leave to them; to her was all the honor of ancestry. The husband on the other hand, even if he knew which his own children were, could see little of them, and could not leave his possessions to them without alienating those possessions from his clan—which the clan-customs would not permit. Thus in marriage he practically had to take the second place.

With the growth however of property and the sense of property, there came a time when the men could stand this state of affairs no longer, and insisted, violently at first, in carrying off the women and locating them in their own tents and among their own clans—a change rudely recorded probably in legends like the Rape of the Sabines, and in all the later customs of Marriage by Capture. And with this change marriage took on new forms. Women became the property of their husbands; they ceased to hold property of their own, in their children or in anything else; and descent was traced through the males only. In the Patriarchal system marriage was closely akin to slavery. Polygamy and Monogamy were the two resulting institutions.

Polyandry may perhaps be looked upon as a survival of the group-marriage in a special form adapted to warrior races; but—as Engels remarks—both Polygamy and Polyandry in any strict sense can only be regarded as exceptional institutions, since if they were general in any one country, that would imply a great preponderance of one sex over the other—unless indeed the two institutions existed side by side in the same country, which notoriously never happens. As a matter of fact in oriental countries Polygamy is confined to the rich, and is so to speak a luxury, within reach of the few only.

Thus it would appear that from the first, in oriental countries, the practices of polygamy and monogamy were intermixed. In Greece and Rome polygamy ceased to be recognized as an institution; though concubinage in one form or another remained. The Monogamic marriage became the legal institution; and the woman was handed over to the man as his chattel: was bought symbolically with his money, in the marriage ceremony; and had at first no more rights of her own than a chattel. In the later times, however, of the Roman Empire, with the institution of the dowry and the power granted to women of holding property, together with the great facilities of divorce allowed, the position of the Roman matron became much improved. And in modern European countries the monogamic institution seems to have passed or be passing through somewhat the same stages as in ancient Greece or Rome.