Marriage and Morals/Chapter IV

From the time that the fact of paternity was first discovered, sex has always been a matter of great interest to religion. This is only what one would expect, since religion concerns itself with everything that is mysterious and important. Fruitfulness, whether of crops, or of flocks and herds, or of women, was of prime importance to men in the beginnings of the agricultural and pastoral stages. Crops did not always flourish and intercourse did not always produce pregnancy. Religion and magic were invoked to make sure of the desired result. In accordance with the usual ideas of sympathetic magic, it was thought that by promoting human fertility the fertility of the soil could be encouraged; and human fertility itself, which was desired in many primitive communities, was promoted by various religious and magical ceremonies. In ancient Egypt, where agriculture appears to have risen before ​the end of the matrilineal epoch, the sexual element in religion was at first not phallic but concerned with the female genitalia, the shape of which was supposed to be suggested by the cowry shell, which accordingly was held to have magic powers and came to be used as currency. This stage, however, passed away, and in later Egypt, as in most ancient civilizations, the sexual element in religion took the form of phallic worship. A very good short account of the most salient facts in this connection will be found in a chapter by Robert Briffault in “Sex in Civilization.”^[1]

“Agricultural festivals,” he says, “and more especially those connected with the planting of seed and the gathering of harvest, present in every region of the world and in every age the most conspicuous examples of general sexual license. … The agricuitural populations of Algeria resent any restrictions being placed upon the licentiousness of their women upon the ground that any attempt to enforce sexual morality would be prejudicial to the success of their agricultural operations. The Athenian thesmophoria, or sowing-feasts, preserved in an attenuated form the original character of the magic of fertility. The women carried phallic emblems and uttered obscenities. The saturnalia were the Roman feasts of sowing, and have ​been succeeded by the carnival of southern Europe, in which phallic symbols, differing little from those in vogue among the Sioux and in Dahomey, were down to recent years a conspicuous feature.”^[2]

In many parts of the world it has been thought that the moon (regarded as masculine) is the true father of all children.^[3] This view is, of course, bound up with moon worship. There has been a curious conflict, not directly relevant to our present subject, between lunar and solar priesthoods and lunar and solar calendars. The calendar has at all times played an important part in religion. In England down to the eighteenth century and in Russia down to the Revolution of 1917, an inaccurate calendar was perpetuated owing to the feeling that the Gregorian calendar was papistical. Similarly, the very inaccurate lunar calendars were everywhere advocated by priests devoted to the worship of the moon, and the victory of the solar calendar was slow and partial. In Egypt this ​conflict was at one time a source of civil war. One may suppose that it was connected with a grammatical dispute as to the gender of the word “moon,” which has remained masculine in German down to the present day. Both sun-worship and moon-worship have left their traces in Christianity, since Christ’s birth occurred at the winter solstice, while his resurrection occurred at the Paschal full moon. Although it is rash to attribute any degree of rationality to primitive civilization, it is nevertheless difficult to resist the conclusion that the victory of the sun worshippers, wherever it occurred, was due to the patent fact that the sun has more influence than the moon over the crops. Accordingly Saturnalia generally occurred in the Spring.

Considerable elements of phallic worship existed in all the pagan religions of antiquity, and supplied the Fathers with many polemical weapons. In spite of their polemics, however, traces of phallic worship survived throughout the Middle Ages, and only Protestantism was finally successful in extirpating all vestiges of it.

“In Flanders and in France ithyphallic saints were not uncommon, such as St. Giles in Brittany, St. René in ​Anjou, St. Greluchon at Bourges, St. Regnaud, St. Arnaud. The most popular throughout southern France, St. Foutin, was reputed to have been the first bishop of Lyons. When his shrine at Embrun was destroyed by the Huguenots, the phenomenal phallus of the holy personage was rescued from the ruins, stained red from abundant libations of wine, which his worshippers had been in the habit of pouring over it, drinking thereafter the potation as an infallible remedy against sterility and impotence.”^[4]

Sacred prostitution is another institution which was very widespread in antiquity. In some places ordinary respectable women went to a temple and had intercourse either with a priest or with a casual stranger. In other cases, the priestesses themselves were sacred harlots. Probably all such customs arose out of the attempt to secure the fertility of women through the favour of the gods, or the fertility of the crops by sympathetic magic.

So far we have been considering pro-sexual elements in religion; anti-sexual elements, however, existed side by side with the others from a very early time, and in the end, wherever Christianity or Buddhism prevailed, these elements won a victory over their opposites. Westermarck gives many instances of what he ​calls “the curious notion that there is something impure and sinful in marriage, as in sexual relations generally.”^[5] In the most diverse parts of the world, quite remote from any Christian or Buddhist influence, there have been orders of priests and priestesses vowed to celibacy. Among the Jews the sect of the Essenes considered all sexual intercourse impure. This view seems to have gained ground in antiquity even in the circles most hostile to Christianity. There was indeed a general tendency towards asceticism in the Roman Empire. Epicureanism nearly died out and Stoicism replaced it among cultivated Greeks and Romans. Many passages in the apocrypha suggest an almost monkish attitude towards women very different from the robust virility of the older books of the Old Testament. The Neoplatonists were almost as ascetic as the Christians. From Persia the doctrine that matter is evil spread to the West and brought with it the belief that all sexual intercourse is impure. This is, though not in an extreme form, the view of the Church, but I do not wish to consider the Church until the next chapter. What is evident is that in certain circumstances men are led ​spontaneously to a horror of sex, and this when it arises is quite as much a natural impulse as the more usual attraction towards sex. It is necessary to take account of it and to understand it psychologically if we are to be able to judge what kind of sexual system is most likely to satisfy human nature.

It should be said to begin with that it is useless to look to beliefs as the source of this kind of attitude. Beliefs of this sort must be in the first place inspired by a mood; it is true that when once they exist they may perpetuate the mood, or at any rate actions in accordance with the mood, but it is hardly likely that they will be the prime causes of an anti-sexual attitude. The two main causes of such an attitude are, I should say, jealousy and sexual fatigue. Wherever jealousy is aroused, even if it be only faintly, the sexual act appears to us disgusting, and the appetite which leads to it seems loathsome. The purely instinctive man, if he could have his way, would have all women love him and him only; any love which they may give to other men inspires in him emotions which may easily pass into moral condemnation. Especially is this the case when the woman is his wife. One finds in Shakespeare, for example, ​that his men do not desire their wives to be passionate. The ideal woman, according to Shakespeare, is one who submits to her husband’s embraces from a sense of duty, but would not think of having a lover, since sex in itself is disagreeable to her and is only endured because the moral law commands that it should be. The instinctive husband, when he finds that his wife has betrayed him, is filled with disgust against both her and her lover and is apt to conclude that all sex is beastly. Especially will this be the case if he has become impotent through excess or old age. Since old men have in most societies more weight than the young, it is natural that the official and correct opinion on sexual matters should be not that of hotheaded youth.

Sexual fatigue is a phenomenon introduced by civilization; it must be quite unknown among animals and very rare among uncivilized men. In a monogamic marriage it is unlikely to occur except in a very small degree since the stimulus of novelty is required with most men to lead them to physiological excess. It is also unlikely to occur when women are free to refuse their favours, for, in that case, like female animals, they will demand courtship be​fore each act of intercourse, and will not yield their favours until they feel that a man’s passions are sufficiently stimulated. This purely instinctive feeling and behaviour have been rendered rare by civilization. What has done most to eliminate it is the economic factor. Married women and prostitutes alike make their living by means of their sexual charms, and do not, therefore, only yield when their own instinct prompts them to do so. This has greatly diminished the part played by courtship, which is Nature’s safeguard against sexual fatigue. Consequently men who are not restrained by a fairly rigid ethic are apt to indulge to excess: this produces in the end a feeling of weariness and disgust, which leads naturally to ascetic convictions.

Where jealousy and sexual fatigue cooperate, as they often do, the strength of the anti-sexual passion may become very great. I think this is the main reason why asceticism is apt to grow up in very licentious societies.

Celibacy as an historical phenomenon has, however, other sources as well. Priests and priestesses dedicated to the service of divinities may be regarded as married to these divinities, and as therefore obliged to abstain from all ​intercourse with mortals. They will naturally be considered exceptionally holy, and thus an association is brought about between holiness and celibacy. Up to our own day in the Catholic Church nuns are regarded as the brides of Christ. And this is certainly one of the reasons why it is thought wicked for them to have intercourse with mortals.

I suspect that other causes more obscure than any we have yet considered had to do with the increasing asceticism of the ancient world in its later days. There are epochs when life seems cheerful, when men are vigorous, and when the joys of this mundane existence are sufficient to give complete satisfaction. There are other epochs when men seem weary, when this world and its joys do not suffice, and when men look to spiritual consolation or a future life to make up for the natural emptiness of this sublunary scene. Compare the Solomon of the “Song of Songs” with the Solomon of Ecclesiastes: the one represents the ancient world in its prime, the other in its decay. What is the cause of this difference I do not profess to know. Perhaps it is something very simple and physiological, such as the substitution of a sedentary urban life for an active life in the ​open air; perhaps the Stoics had sluggish livers; perhaps the author of Ecclesiastes thought that all is vanity because he did not take enough exercise. However that may be, there is no doubt that a mood such as his leads easily to a condemnation of sex. Probably the causes we have suggested, and various others also, contributed to the general weariness of the later centuries of antiquity; and of this weariness asceticism was one feature. Unfortunately it was in this decadent and morbid period that the Christian ethic was formulated. The vigorous men of later periods have had to do their best to live up to an outlook on life belonging to diseased, weary, and disillusioned men who had lost all sense of biological values and of the continuity of human life. This topic, however, belongs to our next chapter.