597. Survivals of sacral harlotry. Analogous customs in Hindostan. The early Portuguese travelers to the East found sacral harlotry in Cochin China. All virgins of noble birth were bound by vows from infancy. Otherwise no honorable man would marry them.[1926] Modern Egyptian dancing girls, Ghowazy or Barmeky, had a tradition that they belonged to a race by themselves. They kept up isolation and peculiar customs. Each was compelled to surrender to a stranger and then to marry a man of her own group.[1927] "Probably Heaven and Earth are the most ancient of all Vedic gods, and from their fancied union, as husband and wife, the other deities and the whole universe were at first supposed to spring." "The whole world is embodied in the woman.... Women are gods. Women are vitality," say the Vedic Scriptures. In Manu[1928] "the self-existent god is described as dividing his own substance and becoming half male and half female."[1929] A competent author, who wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, says that the women attached to the temples in Hindostan sang and danced twice a day, the songs being about mythological subjects and indecent according to the current mores of everyday life. Vows play a very important part in the Hindoo system of sacral harlotry. A woman, with the consent of her husband, vowed her unborn child, if a girl, to the temple, in order to get an easy confinement. It was no disgrace to a family to have a daughter living this life. Barren women visited remote temples, under a vow of self-devotion, in order to bear children. They were victimized by the priests. At festivals of Vishnu priests tried to enlist girls in the attendant multitude. The line between the sacral usage and licentiousness was broken down at some remote resorts, but in the great temples the conduct of the women was not at all shameless, although they were trained to please. They observed perfect decorum. No one could venture on any impropriety with them. The bystanders would not allow it, and the proceedings were all controlled by strict rules. The Brahmins propounded a doctrine that intercourse with the consecrated women would free from sin.[1930] The vows show us the motive which maintained this usage, and these statements clearly show the conventionalization which enveloped the whole. Although the practices in the temples have undergone some modification, they still exist. There are secret mysteries, and dramatic representations of mythological incidents, which seem like survivals of the ancient usages above mentioned.[1931] There are courtesans at the temples near which pilgrims congregate, and they pay part of their earnings to the temple.[1932] The holy festival of Jugganatha, at Puri, which is a spring festival of Vedic origin, is a kind of Saturnalia, in which the bonds of social order are loosened and the standards of decency are laid aside. There are rites in which "words are uttered by persons who, on other occasions, would think themselves disgraced by the use of them."[1933] The Phalgun festival in northern India commemorates Krishna's voluptuous amusements. The rites are indecent.[1934] The mythological stories about the gods have to be converted by interpretation or special pleas into something which modern mores can tolerate.[1935] Songs, dances, pantomimes, and mythological dramas are represented in front of the image of a deity by men, but in the presence of a general company of men and women.[1936] The Sakta worshipers are a sect who worship Sakta, the mighty, mysterious, feminine force recognized in nature, and which they personify as the Mother of the Universe, like the ancient Mother-goddess. This goddess is manifested, for Hindoos, in natural appetites, in highly developed faculties by which one exalts one's self and defeats one's enemies. The rites of the sect are horrible and obscene, and have for their purpose to violate and outrage the restrictions in the mores. By those rites men and women obtain union with the Supreme Being. The members of the sect call themselves "perfect ones" and all others "beasts." They use mystic texts and secret orgies, at which they drink strong drinks, eat meat and fish, and practice sex license. They recognize no caste.[1937] There are also other sects which have inverted all conceptions of decency, propriety, and expediency. They practice self-torture, crime, and uncleanliness, and use loathsome food, etc. In all these matters they show great ingenuity of invention. They are dying out.[1938] There are also sects which are cannibal, incestuous, and practicers of secret license and obscenity.[1939] In some parts of the Madras presidency, girls are made basivis by a vow of the parents, in order to give them the privileges of males. This custom may be derived from the institution of the "appointed daughter," that is, a daughter selected in order that her son may perform the rites for her father (who had no son) and may carry on the line. Modern basivis "live in their father's house. They do not marry, yet they bear children, the father of whom they may choose at pleasure, and the children inherit their family name." It is a device to insure male descendants, and is so regulated by religious consecration and rules that it is recognized in the mores. If a basivi breaks the rules she falls to a status which is very different. Men are also dedicated and wear female dress, if they are born imperfect or malformed.[1940]
598. Lingam and yoni. The lingam symbol is to be seen all over India, alone or with the yoni. In some parts of India the lingam is worn as an amulet.[1941] The word "lingam" is said to mean "symbol."[1942] To Europeans the object seems indecent and obscene. If it is of phallic origin, "the Hindus are no more conscious of the fact than we of the similar origin of the maypole."[1943] It is no more erotic than an egg or a seed. It is a symbol of Siva, the eternal reproductive power of nature, reintegrating after disintegration. One form of Siva is androgyne. The dualism of the male, spirit, and the female, matter, is essential to all creation. "To one imbued with these dualistic conceptions the lingam and the yoni are suggestive of no improper ideas."[1944]
599. Conventionalization. In all these cases it is evident that the mores extend their protection over archaic and sacred things, and preserve them instead of forbidding them. The great means of preserving them is by conventionalization. They are put under a conventional understanding, different from the everyday usages with their ethics, and are judged by an arbitrary standard. In the English translation of the Bible words and phrases are used which are archaic and now under taboo in everyday life. Our children have to be taught that "that is in the Bible," that is, they have to learn the conventionalization by which the archaic forms are covered. The words in the Bible are not subject to criticism, and they cannot be cited to justify similar usage in common life.
600. Mores of Hindostan. The phenomena which are presented in Hindostan, when studied from our standpoint, show how completely different may be the estimate of things according to use and wont. The phenomena are very different in character. Some of them are cases of degeneracy and aberration of customs, after they have been discarded by the mores, have become vicious, and have fallen into the hands of abandoned persons who have given up all position inside the mores. Others of these customs show how old usages, when brought in question, lose innocence. Consciousness and reflection produce doubt and then shame. Sometimes things which are private or secret by convention come in contact with things which are secret by vice. All the phenomena in Hindostan show how completely the moral effect depends on the integrity or decay of conventionalization. The conventionalization is still so strong that the effects on public morals which we might expect are not produced. Public manners are marked by decency and propriety and the society is not vicious.[1945] Things which exist under conventionalization never furnish grounds for an ethical judgment on the group which practices them.
601. Mexican mores. Drunkenness. In Mexico also there were goddesses of erotic passion to whom men and women were consecrated. Courtesans sometimes immolated themselves in the service of the goddess. The notion of virtue in resistance to passion existed, but the goddess, like the Greek Venus, resented any effort to escape her sway and exerted herself to defeat it.[1946] The Mayas did not maintain a severe form of sex taboo and they had festivals at which that taboo was entirely suspended.[1947] Pederasty also existed under the sanction of religion. Young men in the training house, which was a house of lamentation and penance, were allowed license which was contrary to the current mores of the society, but was an old privilege of soldiers. The dances which they performed daily were obscene. The persons in the dance represented vegetation demons, and the dances helped to get good crops.[1948] The notion was not to employ sympathetic magic, but the men, by parallel operations, were supposed to help in the work of fructification which the demons were accomplishing in the plant. Hence a great drama of human coöperation was carried on in the dances. Snakes and frogs were eaten because they were demons of rain and growth. The obscene dances were "not consequences of sex desire, but, on account of their antiquity, they were accepted as a matter of course."[1949] At the time of the Spanish conquest public opinion about the dances was not fixed, but they lasted on through the force of ancient religious tradition. We may be sure that the case of Mexico throws light on the ancient usages of sacral harlotry. In comparatively recent times there were cases in Russia of sex license on the eve of great Christian festivals.[1950] There is a parallel also, amongst the Mexicans, in the case of drunkenness. Religion controlled and forbade drunkenness, but then again allowed it on specified occasions. To drink pulque was forbidden, under penalty of death, except to prescribed persons at certain festivals, but on the festival of the fire god all intoxicated themselves by custom and tradition.[1951] Kings in Central America were expressly allowed to intoxicate themselves at festivals, and functionaries were appointed to perform their duties while they were incapacitated. It is nowadays considered not dishonorable to become intoxicated during festivals, and "it may be observed that Indians now thank God for the gift of drunkenness."[1952] That is a case of the persistence of ideas born of old mores long after another religion and social system have displaced the folkways themselves.
602. Japanese mores. In Japan the government formerly bought girls of fourteen from their parents and caused them to be educated in feminine accomplishments. For ten years they lived as courtesans to the profit of the state. They were then discharged with a sum of money. The number of them at one time was twenty thousand. They furnished at the tea houses afternoon entertainments at which families were present, but men alone remained later.[1953] When a people, through acquaintance with mores different from its own, is led to philosophize about the latter, or is made conscious of them and uncertain about them, then the old mores of that people lose their innocence. The Japanese have had much experience of this within fifty years.
603. Chinese religion and mores. For contrast it may be worth while to notice the evidence collected by Schallmeyer[1954] that the specifically Chinese religions are free from all immoral notions and usages. Indeed the Chinese religions are said to be hostile to indecency. Meadows is quoted as saying that any sentence of the canonical writings of China could be read in any English family without offense, and that there is nothing in Chinese religious rites resembling the immoral rites which are met with elsewhere. Chinese lyric poetry is said to be pure.
604. Philosophy of interest in reproduction. Incest. Some reserve in regard to the interpretation of myths is proper and necessary, but the absorbing interest of sex production for man, after he begins to depend upon it and coöperate with it for his food supply, is a product of the study of myths which may be accepted with confidence. That interest was no more sensual than interest in the rainfall, and the mythologizing about it was no more depraved than mythologizing about creation or language. Men were sure to apply all which they learned about reproduction in food plants and animals to their own reproduction. If Chaldean civilization goes back five or six thousand years before Christ, then the Chaldeans had had ample time, even before Hammurabi, to experience the evils of overpopulation and of sex vice. In the Chaldean mythology Ishtar, goddess of all sex attraction and repulsion, destroyed all the lovers whom she selected. She had the double character, which appears in all myths and philosophy, of sex license and sex renunciation together. She was a goddess of the mother family and polyandric.[1955] The two policies, sex license and sex renunciation, were both advocated at the same time in the early centuries of the Christian era and in the Middle Ages. Men found out that the problem of reproduction for them was far more complicated than the multiplication of dates to the utmost limit. At this point of knowledge instinctive or intelligent regulations had to be put on physical appetites. For primitive men the reproductive function is as simple a function as eating or sleeping. It is not in itself wicked or base. It is naïve until knowledge comes. Then it is found that rules must be made to regulate the interest. If there are rules, there is the sense of wrongdoing in the breach of them. A thing which is tabooed becomes interesting and more or less awful. The numbers of the sexes are never exactly equal, and the proportion is further disturbed by polygamy. Therefore experience of evil and inconvenience forced some reflection and some judgments as to life policy. Regulations were devised behind which there was a philosophy of the satisfaction of interests; that is to say, mores were developed to cover the case. There seems also to be some connection between sacral harlotry and the prevention of incest. The poorest who cannot marry or buy slaves have always practiced incest (sec. 516). Sacral harlotry won another religious sanction from these cases. In the laws of Hammurabi we find two classes of women attached to the temple. If the interpretations of the specialists may be trusted, the arrangement was in one class of cases in the nature of a life annuity, and those who had no husband had the god for a husband,—an idea which, with one or another new coloring, has come down to our own time. That any one should renounce the sex function was not within the mental horizon of early times. When the women lived in the temple that fact established conventionalization about them and gave to their life that regulation which has made decency and order in all ages. Their case was defined and sanctioned in the mores. The couples retired outside the temple.[1956] When marriage was accompanied by very easy divorce and could not be defined except as a form of property right of the husband, when there were concubines who were not wives only because they had no property, and slaves who had no defined relation to the household until they had borne children to the head of it, the women in the temple might be surrounded by other special forms of taboo which would give them a status within the mores. They were "holy" by virtue of their consecration to the goddess.[1957] So far as we know, their lives were not spent in dissipation. The accounts in Herodotus and Baruch vi. 43, of the later usage at Babylon show that there was method and decorum in the institution, and that it was carried on with conventional dignity. It is our custom to think out the consistency of all our doctrines and usages. It is certain that ancient peoples did not do that, just as the masses now do not. They accepted and lived in unquestioned usage. Therefore we know of cases in classic society in which maidens and matrons on special occasions shared in functions which seem totally repugnant to their character. The explanation lies in conventionalization within the mores for an occasion or under a conjuncture of circumstances. It is unquestionably possible that in that way lewdness can be set aside and thus corrupting effect on character can be prevented.
605. The archaic is sacred. In the minds of primitive people all which is archaic is sacred and all which is novel is questionable. Therefore religion holds and consecrates whatever is archaic and traditional. The appetites of men were anterior to any mores regulative of them, and the goddess Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, or Venus is a goddess of erotic passion and reproduction. The folkways devised to prevent experienced ills are an invasion of her domain and a rebellion against her sway. The regulations cannot be made absolute for a long time. There must be a compromise. Some females must be given to the goddess as devotees, at least under conditions, or there must be set times and places within which her sway shall be unhampered by human rules. The conditions establish conventionalization around an institution. It is by this process and by changing the conditions that marriage has been made what it now is. Concubinage, slave women, harlotry, and all other forms but the prescribed one have been put under taboo. It is very possible that some future generation will look back in wonder at our self-complacency, which feels no care or responsibility for the women who are forced, in our system, to renounce sex. It is safe to say that the Chaldeans of 2500 B.C. would have been as much shocked at the inhumanity of our arrangement as we can be at the lewdness of theirs.
606. Child sacrifice. The temple consecration of women must be connected with child sacrifice. The latter is logically anterior. Their historical relation we do not know. To dedicate a girl to the goddess would be an alternative to the sacrifice of her. All forms of child sacrifice and sacral suicide go back to the pangs and terrors of men under loss and calamity. Something must be found which would wring pity and concession from the awful superior powers who afflict mankind. Every one born under this human lot must perish if he is not redeemed. His first vicarious sacrifice is his firstborn, but if he can get a war captive from a foreign group this substitute may be accepted. The Mexican human sacrifices were of this kind. The people stood around assenting and rejoicing, because the rite meant salvation to themselves and their children. A man who took a captive in war gave him to the priest to be sacrificed, and he might not eat of the flesh, "since the victim was in a sense his son," that is, took the place of his son as a vicarious sacrifice for himself. They also sacrificed their own infants.[1958] Child sacrifice expresses the deepest horror and suffering produced by experience of the human lot. Men must do it. Their interests demanded it, however much it might pain them. Human sacrifices may be said to have been universal. They lasted down to the half-civilized stage of all nations and sporadically even later,[1959] and they have barely ceased amongst the present half-civilized peoples.[1960] They are not primarily religious. They are a reaction of men under the experience of the ills of life, inventing a world philosophy and putting agents behind it, in order to have something, if it be only a delusion, to which hope of escape can attach. Human sacrifices are based on an inference or deduction. There is behind them an assumption as to the character and logic of the superior powers who rule the aleatory interest. It is not until skepticism arises as to this assumption that the usage can be given up.