Since the subject first engaged my close attention, it has always seemed to me incomprehensible that a dispute should ever have arisen among anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians of civilization as to whether, among the primitive forms of the sexual relationship, marriage was the first, or whether it was preceded by a state of sexual promiscuity.
Whoever knows the nature of the sexual impulse, whoever has arrived at a clear understanding regarding the course of human evolution, and, finally, whoever has studied the conditions that even now prevail, alike among primitive peoples and among modern civilized races, in the matter of sexual relations, can have no doubt whatever that in the beginnings of human development a state of sexual promiscuity did actually prevail.[155]
“The ideal goal,” says Heinrich Schurtz, “towards which, more or less consciously, civilized humanity is undoubtedly advancing, involuntarily also becomes the standard by which the past is judged, and sentiment and mood take the place of a single-minded endeavour to arrive at truth.”
Thus it has happened that the ideal of permanent marriage between a single man and a single woman, which, in fact, as we shall proceed to explain, must persist as an ideal of civilization never to be lost, has been employed as a standard for the judgment of bygone conditions. This error is one into which Westermarck more especially has fallen in his “History of Human Marriage” (Jena, 1893)—a work of considerable value from its richness in ethnological detail. Hence Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity, based as it is upon false premises, “has ultimately remained barren,” as Heinrich Schurtz has proved.[156] Westermarck, for example, simply ignores the fact that within the group-marriage of sexual associates, within the totem, promiscuity undoubtedly existed.
Since, as we shall see, among the tribes and races living in social unions, sexual promiscuity can be proved to have existed side by side with, and commonly in advance of, the development of marriage, it is indubitable that primitive man, in whom the sexual impulse was still purely instinctive, had simply no knowledge of “marriage” in the modern sense of the term. Otherwise, indeed, the “mother-right” would not have been necessary, for matriarchy was the typical expression of the uncertainty of paternity which resulted from sexual promiscuity.
The great freedom of sexual intercourse in primitive times is denoted by various investigators by many different terms; sometimes it is called “promiscuity,” sometimes “free-love,” sometimes “group-marriage,” “polyandry,” “polygamy,” “religious and sexual prostitution,” etc. The classical works of Bachofen, Bastian, Giraud-Teulon, von Hellwald, Kohler, Friedrich S. Krauss, Lubbock, MacLennan, Morgan, Friedrich Müller, Post, H. Schurtz, Wilcken, and others, have proved beyond question the existence of this primordial hetairism.
When modern critics at length find it convenient to admit the overwhelming force of the enormous mass of evidence that has been collected concerning this subject, they still exhibit a great dislike to the conception and the term sexual “promiscuity,” whereby is understood the boundless and indiscriminate intermingling of the sexes. They admit the possibility of group-marriage, although this is merely a socially limited form of promiscuity; they admit even the existence of polyandry and polygamy, and of indiscriminate religious prostitution; but they refuse to believe in the existence of genuine promiscuity.
And yet, if they only chose to make use of their eyes, they could observe sexual promiscuity at the present day among the modern civilized nations. In certain strata and classes of the population, such an indiscriminate and unregulated sexual intercourse, in no way leading to the formation of enduring relationships, can be observed to-day. Ask a young man, even of the better classes, with how many women he has had connexion during a single year—not one of these need have been a prostitute—and, if he speaks the truth, you will be astounded at the number of the “objects of lust”! This last expression is suitable enough, because in most cases there is no individual relationship between such casual partners. Ask certain girls also—maidservants, for example, or girls engaged in the manufacture of ready-made clothing—and you will obtain analogous information regarding the number of their annual lovers. Phillip Frey (“Der Kampf der Geschlechter”—“The Battle of the Sexes,” p. 51; Vienna, 1904) bases on similar grounds the assumption of a primitive sexual promiscuity; he refers especially to the condition of the seaports:
“Ports in which ocean-going vessels come to harbour are familiar with the sexual impulse in its most completely animal form, and devoid of every refinement and concealment. We find ourselves transported into the depths of an urgent primitiveness and savagery, which gives the lie to the advance in civilization, and this will enable us to form a clearer idea of the bestial indifference in sexual matters that must have obtained amongst the herds of primitive man. Intercourse between man and woman promoted by the lust of the moment, dependent solely upon reciprocal animal desire, the various male and female individuals of the human herd differing too little each from the other to make it worth while to strive for permanent rights of possession, the absence of any ownership of land amongst those wandering to and fro through the primeval forest, the common ownership of children by the herd or tribe—that such was the primitive, ape-like condition of the human race, one actually inferior to that of many other mammals, is a belief amply justified by the polygamous and polyandrous instincts of homo sapiens, recurring again and again in all the stages of civilization.”
Fortunately, ethnology furnishes us with incontrovertible proofs of genuine promiscuity.