[2] Man, Sonthalia, p. 101.
[3] von Weber, Vier Jahre in Afrika, ii. 215.
[4] Southey, History of Brazil, i. 240.
[5] Percy Smith, ‘Futuna.’ in Jour. Polynesian Soc. i. 39 sq.
[6] Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, pp. 368, 372. Seemann, Viti, p. 399 sq. Fison, ‘Fijian Burial Customs,’ in Jour. Anthr. Inst. x. 139. Williams and Calvert, Fiji, p. 206. For other instances see Westermarck, op. cit. p. 136, n. 10.
Among peoples of archaic culture celibacy is likewise a great exception and marriage regarded as a duty. In ancient Peru marriage was compulsory at a certain age.[7] Among the Aztecs no young man lived single till his twenty-second year, unless he intended to become a priest, and for girls the customary marrying-age was from eleven to eighteen. In Tlascala, we are told, the unmarried state was so despised that a grown-up man who would not marry had his hair cut off for shame.[8]
[7] Garcilasso de la Vega, First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, i. 306 sq.
[8] Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit, v. 46 sq. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, ii. 251 sq.
“Almost all Chinese,” says Dr. Gray, “robust or infirm, well-formed or deformed, are called upon by their parents to marry as soon as they have attained the age of puberty. Were a grown-up son or daughter to die unmarried, the parents would regard it as most deplorable.” Hence a young man of marriageable age, whom consumption or any other lingering disease had marked for its own, would be compelled by his parents or guardians to marry at once.[9] So indispensable is marriage considered by the Chinese, that even the dead are married, the spirits of all males who die in infancy or in boyhood being in due time married to the spirits of females who have been cut off at a like early age.[10] There is a maxim by Mencius, re-echoed by the whole nation, that it is a heavy sin to have no sons, as this would doom father, mother, and the whole ancestry in the Nether-world to a pitiable existence without descendants enough to serve them properly, to worship at the ancestral tombs, to take care of the ancestral tablets, and duly to perform all rites and ceremonies connected with the departed dead. For a man whose wife has reached her fortieth year without bringing him a son, it is an imperative duty to take a concubine.[11] In Corea “the male human being who is unmarried is never called a man, whatever his age, but goes by the name of ‘yatow,’ a name given by the Chinese to unmarriageable young girls; and the man of thirteen or fourteen has a perfect right to strike, abuse, order about the ‘yatow’ of thirty, who dares not as much as open his lips to complain.”[12]
[9] Gray, China, i. 186.