Dr. Gaster has given us a version, hitherto unpublished, in which “Tobiyah took the heart of a fish and put it in a censer and burnt it under the clothes of Sarah. And Ashmedai (the demon) received the smells and fled instantly.” This contra-demonical property in a fish appears elsewhere, e.g. in the Macedonian charm, which prescribes for one possessed the wearing of and the fumigation with the glands of a fish, to ensure that “the demons will flee from him.”
The jealous passion of demons or devils for maidens colours Asian, African, and European folk-lores. They lie in wait for married couples; sternly guard their so-called brides.[1068] Otherwise they were usually innocuous. Tobias argues with the angel, “If I go in unto her, I die as the others before: for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth nobody, but those that come in unto her” (vi. 14).
According to the Testament of Solomon, Asmodeus (the demon) avows, “my business is to plot against the newly wedded, so that they may not know one another. I sever them by many calamities, and I waste away the beauty of virgin women.” In Asmodeus we recognise a male counterpart of Lilith and her dangerous relations with men. The demon, in fact, regards the virgin as his own, himself as her true and constant lover, and resents, prevents, or “avenges any infringement of his jus primæ noctis.”[1069]
The misconception, evident in the last eight words of this learned writer, as to what constituted the jus primæ noctis prevails widely. As the jus is the child, strange as the parentage may appear, of the tale of Tobias and Sara, it seems worth our while to notice the strangely erroneous views held both as to the possessor of the jus and the occasion of its exercise, and shortly to explain, even at the risk of seeming to stray from fishing into folklore, the origin and the establishment of the custom.
According to popular belief the superior or lord of the fee, among other feudal privileges, possessed, as such, the vested right of connection with the daughters of his tenantry or of holders of land under him on the first night of their marriages. Some writers on the French Revolution, indeed, indignantly class the wide and brutal exercise of this right on chaste maidens by licentious seigneurs as not the least, perhaps one of the most provocative, of the social causes, which led to the detestation and subsequent massacre of the noblesse in many départements and to the overthrow of the old landed system!
But alas! “this sad old romance, this unchivalrous story” (to vary Lucille) must go to the wall. The jus, as thus conceived and described, never in fact existed anywhere in civilised Europe. The figment of its ruthless exercise as a legal right by licentious lordlings owes its existence to a vivid imagination uninfected by one germ of truth, as Lord Hailes, M. L. Veuillot, and others clearly demonstrate.[1070]
It must come as a severe shock to preconceived ideas to run up against the dull facts of history, and thence discover that the jus primæ noctis, so far from being the barbarous privilege of deflowering an unwilling bride, was merely a right accorded by the Church to the husband on the payment of a varying fee to the bishops, etc., for the privilege of disregarding the ecclesiastical ordinance, which required that his bride should remain in a state of virginity for one, two, or three days![1071]
Continence for one night was first enjoined in the decree passed by the Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 a.d.[1072] This, extended to “two or three days,” figured not only in the Capitularies of Charlemagne,[1073] but was received into the Canon Law, and was twice repeated in the decretals of the Catholic Church.[1074]
But what, it may be fairly asked, has the jus primæ noctis got to do with our Tobias and Sara? The history of the connection deserves tracing, not only to clear away its obscurity, but also to show how a custom—important in result but based simply on a variant version of Tobit—was by the Church early adopted and widely inculcated. The days, during which the continence enjoined on the newly married could only be disregarded if the husband had previously paid for the privilege a fee to some religious authority, came to be known as “Tobias Days.”
No searching, however diligent, of the Septuagint or of our A. or R. Versions, nor (it seems) of the Aramaic text of the tale of Tobit sheds light on the origin of the custom or of the application of the name.