With the Moors of Java, relates Schouten, the father of the bride carries her, all swathed up, to the bridegroom. The latter, aided by two of his paranymphs, lifts her on a horse and rides away with her. Once arrived at his house he hides his wife there and goes off, without thanking his assistants and friends.
Many European races have also practised the ceremonial of marriage by capture. The Bœotians, says Pausanias, conducted the wives to the house of the husband in a chariot, of which they afterwards solemnly burnt the pole, to indicate that the woman was henceforth the property of her master, and was never to think of quitting his abode. But in ancient Greece it was at Sparta especially that the nuptial ceremony of capture was practised.[254] A frequently quoted passage from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus gives us details on this point. “In their marriages the bridegroom carried off the bride by violence; and she was never chosen in a tender age, but when she had arrived at full maturity. Then the woman that had the direction of the wedding cut the bride’s hair close to the skin, dressed her in a man’s clothes, laid her upon a mattress, and left her in the dark. The bridegroom, neither oppressed with wine nor enervated with luxury, but perfectly sober, as having always supped at the common table, went in privately, untied her girdle, and carried her to another bed. Having stayed there a short time, he modestly retired to his usual apartment to sleep with the other young men, and observed the same conduct afterwards, spending the day with his companions and reposing himself with them in the night, nor even visiting his bride but with great caution and apprehensions of being discovered by the rest of the family; the bride at the same time exerted all her art to contrive convenient opportunities for their private meetings,” etc.[255]
At Rome the ceremonial of capture was kept up for a long time in the plebeian marriages, without confarreation or coemption. As in so many other countries, they played the comedy of the carrying off of the bride by the bridegroom with the pretended resistance of the mother and the relations.[256] In the more respectable marriages the ceremonial of capture was simplified, but still very significant. The hair of the bride was separated with the point of a javelin (hasta celibaris),[257] and for this symbolic ceremony a javelin that had pierced the body of a gladiator was preferred. Then the bride, conducted to the house of her husband, was to enter it without touching the threshold; she was lifted over it.[258] It is curious to find this same custom in China now in our own day, and we can hardly help recognising in it the symbolic embodiment of capture.
A similar ceremonial is always practised in Circassia. In the midst of a feast the bridegroom enters, escorted by his friends, and carries off his bride, who henceforth becomes his wife.[259]
Moreover, as at Sparta, the newly-married Circassian must not visit the wife, except in secret, for a whole year—a term evidently fixed, as at Sparta, for the period of probable pregnancy.[260]
It is not very long ago that a ceremonial of the same kind was observed quite near us, in Wales. On the day fixed, the bridegroom and his friends, all on horseback, came to take the bride; but they found themselves in the presence of the friends of the young girl, also on horseback, and a mock fight ensued, during which the future wife fled on the crupper of the horse of her nearest relative. But instantly the squadron of the bridegroom, counting sometimes two or three hundred horse, galloped in pursuit. Finally they rejoined the fugitive, and all was terminated by a feast and common rejoicings.[261]
In Livonia every marriage was also the occasion of a simulated combat of cavalry, as with the Welsh, but it took place before the marriage.[262] In Poland also, and in Lithuania and Russia, the seizure of the girl often preceded marriage.
I shall here end the enumeration of these customs, which are all manifestly symbolical of capture. We still find the trace of it even in the Brittany of to-day, where the representative of the husband, the bazvalan, and the parents of the fiancée sing, alternately, strophes of a marriage song, in which the one asks and the others refuse the bride, offering in her stead either a younger sister, or the mother or grandmother.[263] Our inquiry is terminated; it remains now to ask what is the meaning of this ceremonial so widely spread in all ages and in all countries.
III. Signification of the Ceremonial of Capture.
The author of an interesting book on primitive marriage, Mr. McLennan, and after him a great number of sociologists, have concluded that in savage societies sexual unions or associations have been generally effected by the violent capture of the woman, that by degrees these captures have become friendly ones, and have at length ended in a peaceful exogamy, retaining the ancient custom only in the ceremonial form.