This ferocity and this coarse assimilation of captured women to cattle are not peculiar to the people of God, but prevailed amongst the primitive Arabs,[233] or rather amongst all the Semites, who were still savage or barbarous.
Capture in war has, besides, been largely practised by all races and throughout the world. An old Irish poem, the “Duan Eiranash,” speaks of three hundred women carried off by the Picts from the Gaels, who, finding themselves thus deprived of their women by a single blow, allied themselves then with the Irish.
I will confine myself to these examples, gleaned from all parts, and which it would be easy to multiply. They amply suffice to establish that in primitive societies woman, being held in very low esteem, is absolutely reduced to the level of chattels and of domestic animals; that she represents a booty like any other; that her master can use and abuse her without fear. But in these bestial practices there is nothing which approaches, even distantly, to marriage, and we are not in the least warranted to call these brutal rapes marriages. Even in the countries where a true marriage exists, the customs and the laws tolerate for a long time the introduction into the house of the husband of captured slaves, who are treated by the master as concubines by the side of the legitimate wife or wives. The heroes of Homer profit largely by this legal tolerance, and when the Clytemnestra of Æschylus justifies herself for having killed her husband, she alleges, among other extenuating circumstances, the intimacy of Agamemnon with his slave Cassandra.
Assuredly in all this there is no marriage. We shall presently see that in many countries the concubinate, legal and patent, has co-existed, or co-exists, by the side of marriage without being confounded with it. It is important to reserve the name of marriage by capture to legal and pacific marriage, in the ceremonial of which we find practices recalling or simulating by survival the primitive rape of woman.
II. Marriage by Capture.
It is to be observed that this symbolic rape does not always signify that the capture of the woman has preceded pacific conjugal union. It represents especially a mental survival, the tradition of an epoch, more or less distant, when violence was held in high esteem, and when it was glorious to procure slaves for all sorts of labour by force of arms. In the countries where the ceremonial of capture exists, the fine times of rape are generally somewhat gone by, but the mind is still haunted by it, and even in peaceful marriages, after the contract or bargain is concluded, men like to symbolise in the ceremonial the rapes of former days, which they cannot and dare not any longer commit. These practices have also another bearing: they signify that the bride, then nearly always purchased from her parents, must be in complete subjection to the master that has been given her, and occupy the humblest place in the conjugal house.
For all these reasons the symbolic ceremonial of capture has been, or is still, in use with many races at the celebration of their marriages. In some degree it is found all over the world. Among the Esquimaux of Cape York the marriages are arranged in a friendly way by the parents of the future couple, and nevertheless, from the infancy of the latter, the conjugal ceremony must simulate a capture. The future bride must fly, must defend herself with her feet and hands, scream at the height of her voice, until her new master has succeeded in taking her to his hut, where she at once settles happily.[234]
In the same way, in Greenland the bridegroom captures his bride, or has her captured for him; and in the latter case he has recourse to the help of two or three old women.[235]
With the Indians of Canada, where sometimes a true marriage is concluded in presence of the chief of the tribe, when he has pronounced the matrimonial formula, “the husband turns round, stoops down, takes his wife on his back, and carries her to his tent, amid the acclamations of the spectators.”[236]
Some Redskin tribes, observed by Lafitau, symbolised rape even in the intimate relations between young couples. The husband was obliged to enter the wigwam of his wife in the night; it would be a grave impropriety for him to approach it in the day-time.[237]