Religion—derived from the largest actual acquaintance with, and
acceptance of, all the facts both of mundane and extra-mundane
consciousness—neither (like some secularists) denying the one, nor (like
some religionists) minimizing or contemning the other? And is it not
possible that in the early Star and Sex worships we have evidence of the
attempt of the human mind to establish some such sane polarity?
NOTE
ON THE PRIMITIVE GROUP-MARRIAGE
One of the early forms of union among human beings appears to have been
that of the Group-marriage, which was an alliance between a group of men
and a group of women. It had various forms, but rested in general on the
fact that the women in primitive societies did not, on marriage, leave
their parental habitation but remained there and were visited by the
men—by one man first, who would come with presents of game, etc., from
the chase, and would afterwards bring his “brothers” or friends. Thus in
general a group of “brothers” would come into relation with a group of
“sisters.” In such a state of society, however, it is obvious that
parentage would be very uncertain, and the terms brother and sister
would not always have the stricter meanings which we give them. Such a
group-marriage was the “Punalua” or “friend” marriage of Morgan’s North
American Indians; which is also supposed by Marx and Engels to have
prevailed at an early time throughout Polynesia. See Lewis Morgan’s
“Ancient Society” and Friedrich Engels’ “Ursprung der Familie.”
In later times the group-marriage became restricted in various
directions, according to the genius of various races—marriage of
cousins, for instance, being severely prohibited among some barbaric
tribes, while among others all relatives (in the maternal line) were
barred. Thus ultimately, in some quarters, sprang up a Pair-marriage;
which however was only loosely defined; which had much of the old
group-marriage lingering round it; and in which the children still
belonged to the woman, and descent was traced in the maternal line only.
Under these conditions of society the woman was comparatively well off.
Remaining as she did in her own gens or clan and among her own
relations, and the husband being as it were a visitor from the outside,
she was by no means subject to him; in fact, in order to gain access, he
had to make himself agreeable not only to her but to her own family! She
had the disposal of the children; there was no danger of their being
sequestrated to her husband; and whatever little property she had she
could leave to them; to her was all the honor of ancestry. The husband
on the other hand, even if he knew which his own children were, could
see little of them, and could not leave his possessions to them without
alienating those possessions from his clan—which the clan-customs would
not permit. Thus in marriage he practically had to take the second
place.
With the growth however of property and the sense of property, there
came a time when the men could stand this state of affairs no longer,
and insisted, violently at first, in carrying off the women and locating
them in their own tents and among their own clans—a change rudely
recorded probably in legends like the Rape of the Sabines, and in all
the later customs of Marriage by Capture. And with this change marriage
took on new forms. Women became the property of their husbands; they
ceased to hold property of their own, in their children or in anything
else; and descent was traced through the males only. In the Patriarchal
system marriage was closely akin to slavery. Polygamy and Monogamy were
the two resulting institutions.
Polyandry may perhaps be looked upon as a survival of the group-marriage
in a special form adapted to warrior races; but—as Engels remarks—both
Polygamy and Polyandry in any strict sense can only be regarded as
exceptional institutions, since if they were general in any one country,
that would imply a great preponderance of one sex over the other—unless
indeed the two institutions existed side by side in the same country,
which notoriously never happens. As a matter of fact in oriental
countries Polygamy is confined to the rich, and is so to speak a luxury,
within reach of the few only.
Thus it would appear that from the first, in oriental countries, the
practices of polygamy and monogamy were intermixed. In Greece and Rome
polygamy ceased to be recognized as an institution; though concubinage
in one form or another remained. The Monogamic marriage became the legal
institution; and the woman was handed over to the man as his chattel:
was bought symbolically with his money, in the marriage ceremony; and
had at first no more rights of her own than a chattel. In the later
times, however, of the Roman Empire, with the institution of the dowry
and the power granted to women of holding property, together with the
great facilities of divorce allowed, the position of the Roman matron
became much improved. And in modern European countries the monogamic
institution seems to have passed or be passing through somewhat the same
stages as in ancient Greece or Rome.
ON JEALOUSY.
A great disturber of the celestial order of Love is Jealousy—that brand
of physical passion which carried over into the emotional regions of the
mind will sometimes rage there like a burning fire. One may distinguish
two kinds of jealousy, a natural and an artificial. The first arises
perhaps from the real uniqueness of the relationship between two
persons—at any rate as it appears to one of them—and the endeavor to
stamp this uniqueness on the whole relationship, sexual and
moral—especially on the sexual relationship. This kind of jealousy seems
in a sense natural and normal, at any rate for a period; but when the
personal relation between the two parties has been fully and confessedly
established, and is no more endangered, the feeling does often I think
(equally naturally) die away; and may do so quite well without damaging
the intimacy and uniqueness of the alliance. This jealousy is felt with
terrible keenness and intensity by lovers before the consummation of
their passion, and perhaps for a year or two afterwards—though it may be
protracted rather indefinitely in the case where the alliance, on one
side at any rate, is not quite satisfactory.
The other kind of jealousy rests on the sense of property, and is the
kind that is often felt by the average husband and wife long after
honeymooning days—by the husband not because of his especial devotion to
his partner, but because he is furious at the idea of her disposing as
she likes with what he considers his property; and by the wife because
she is terrified at the thought that her matrimonial clothes-peg, from
which depend all her worldly prospects, may vanish away or become the
peg for another woman’s clothes. This kind of jealousy is more
especially the product of immediate social conditions, and is in that
sense artificial. Though probably not quite so heart-rending as the
other, it is often passionate enough, and lasts on indefinitely, like a
chronic disease.
In early times, with the more communistic feeling of primitive
societies, and with customs (like group-marriage) which allowed some
latitude in sex-relation, jealousy though strong was not probably a very
great force. But with the growth of individualism in life and in love,
with the rise of the sense of property under civilization and the
accentuation of every personal feeling in what may be called the
cellular state of society, the passion became one of fearful and
convulsive power and fury; as is borne witness to by numberless dramas
and poems and romances of the historical period. In the communism and
humanism of the future, as the sense of property declines, and as Love
rises more and more out of mere blind confusion with the sex-act, we may
fairly hope that the artificial jealousy will disappear altogether, and
that the other form of the passion will subside again into a
comparatively reasonable human emotion.
ON THE FAMILY
A change somewhat similar to that in the position of Jealousy has taken
place in the role of the Family during the progress of society into and
through the period of civilization. In the primitive human association
the Family was large in extent, and in outline vague; the boundaries of
kinship, in cases where the woman might have several husbands, or the
husband several wives, were hard to trace; paternal feeling was little
or not at all developed; and the whole institution rested on the
maternal instinct of care for the young. In the middle societies of
civilization, and with monogamic arrangements, the Family grew
exceedingly definite in form and circumscribed in extent. The growth of
property and competition, and the cellular system of society, developed
a kind of warfare between the units of which society was composed. These
units were families. The essential communism and fraternity of society
at large was dwarfed now and contracted into the limits of the family;
and this institution acquired an extraordinary importance from the fact
that it alone kept alive and showed in miniature (intensified by the
darkness and chaos and warfare outside) the sacred fire of human
fraternity. So great was this importance in fact that the Holy Family
became one of the central religious conceptions of the civilized period,
and it was commonly thought that society owed its existence to the
Family—instead of, as was the case, the truth being reverse, namely that
the Family was the condensation of the principle which had previously
existed, though diffused and unconscious, throughout society.
The third and future stage is of course easy to see—that is, the
expansion again of the conception of the family consciously into the
fraternity and communism of all society. It is obvious that as this
takes place the family will once more lose its definition of outline and
merge more and more again with the larger social groups in which it is
embedded—but not into the old barbaric society in which the conception
of human fellowship lay diffused and only dimly auroral, but into the
newer society in which it shall be clear and all-illuminating as the
sun.
Thus the Family institution in its present form, and as far as that form
may be said to be artificial, will doubtless pass away. Nevertheless
there remains of course, and must remain, its natural or physiological
basis—namely the actual physical relation of the parents to each other
and to the child. One perhaps of the most valuable results of the
Monogamic family institution under civilization has been the development
of the paternal feeling for the child, which in primitive society was so
weak. To-day the love of man and wife for each other is riveted, as it
never was in ancient days, by the tender beauty of the child-face, in
which each parent sees with strange emotion his own features blended
with the features of his loved one—the actual realization of that union
which the lovers so desired, and which yet so often seemed to them after
all not consummated. The little prolongation of oneself, carrying in its
eyes the star-look of another’s love, and descending a stranger into the
world to face a destiny all its own, touches the most personal and
mortal-close feelings (as well as perhaps the most impersonal) of the
heart. And while to-day this sight often reconciles husband and wife to
the legal chains which perforce hold them together, in a Free Society,
we may hope, it will more often be the sign and seal of a love which
neither requires nor allows any kind of mechanical bond.
ON PREVENTIVE CHECKS TO POPULATION.
This is no doubt a complex and difficult subject. Nature from far back
time has provided in the most determined and obstinate way for the
perpetuation of organic life, and has endowed animals, and even plants,
with a strong sexual instinct. By natural selection this instinct tends,
it would seem, to be accentuated; and in the higher animals and man it
sometimes attains a pitch almost of ferocity. In civilized man this
effect is further increased by the intensity of consciousness, which
reflects desire on itself, as well as by collateral conditions of life
and luxury.
In the animal and plant world generally, and up to the realm of Man,
Nature appears to be perfectly lavish in the matter, and careless of the
waste of seed and of life that may ensue, provided her object of
race-propagation is attained; and naturally when the time arrives that
Man, objecting to this waste, faces up to the problem, he finds it no
easy one to solve.
And not only Man (the male) objects to lower Nature’s method of
producing superfluous individuals only to kill them off again in the
struggle for existence; but Woman objects to being a mere machine for
perpetual reproduction.
There are only two ways commonly proposed of meeting the difficulty:
either (1) the adoption of some kind of artificial preventatives to
conception, or (2) the exercise of very considerable continence and
self-control in the face of the powerful instinct of procreation. Of
course, also, the two methods may be used in conjunction with each
other.
(1) It must be acknowledged that artificial checks to population are for
the most part very unsatisfactory: their uncertainty, their desperate
matter-of-factness, so fatal to real feeling, the probability that they
are in one way or another dangerous or harmful, and then their
one-sideness, since here—as so often in matters of sex—the man’s
satisfaction is largely at the cost of the woman: all these things are
against them. One method however—that which consists in selecting, for
sexual congress, a certain part of the woman’s monthly cycle, can hardly
be called artificial, and is altogether the least open to the objections
cited. Its success truly is not absolutely certain, but is perhaps
sufficiently nearly so for the general purpose of regulating the family;
and if the method involves some self-control, it does not at any rate
make an impracticable demand in that direction.
(2) To adopt the method of self-control alone without regard to (1)
would practically mean, in those instances where children were thought
undesirable, an entire abstinence from actual intercourse, and would in
most cases be making too great a demand on human nature, as well as, in
some, running a possible risk of prejudice to health. No doubt the
danger of prejudice to health has been greatly exaggerated; for as a
rule a strong effort towards voluntary continence is one of the best
safeguards of health; but it does not follow from this that complete
abstinence is generally either practicable or desirable. It may,
however, be said that it is in the direction of self-control rather than
in the direction of unlimited “checks” that we should look for the
future; and that if some effort were made towards a wise choice of the
periods of congress, the general object in view would be attained
without putting an inordinate strain upon the average human nature, and
without necessitating recourse to doubtful and artificial devices. The
effort itself, too, would lead to that Transmutation of sex-force into
the higher emotional elements, of which we have spoken already, and
which is such an important factor in Evolution.
I do not much doubt that, as society evolves, the sex-difficulty
generally—which has been such a serious one during the
civilization-period—will to a great extent subside again. As to
excessive breeding (which of course does not necessarily mean excessive
sex-congress) it is probably a phenomenon which marks different races
during a certain period of their growth and maturity, and which passes
away again. And as to excessive sex-desire, since the animals certainly
do not show the inordinateness of man in this respect, there is hope for
man too when he comes to his senses! A cleaner life, a cleaner diet, the
habit of the open air, the growth of the mind to wider interests, the
growth of Love itself—all will help. The two last-mentioned elements
indeed necessarily evoke a certain effort of control over the more
animal instinct—and a kind of conflict, until the two portions of the
nature are brought into harmony.
APPENDIX
PAGE 7.—“_Natural Reticence._”
Sex belongs to the Unconscious or universal-conscious regions of our
nature (which is the meaning perhaps of Modesty), and will resume its
place there some day. Meanwhile, having crept into the Conscious, it
must for the time being be sincerely faced there.
PAGE 14.—“_To Teach the Child First, Quite Openly, its Physical Relation
to its Own Mother._”
“It was not without much anxiety that I took the first step on a road I
intended to explore alone. Chance favored me. I was in Java, and amongst
my servants was a dressmaker, married to the groom. This woman had a
dear little baby with a velvety brown skin and bright black eyes, the
admiration of my little daughter, whom I took with me to see mother and
child, when the baby was a few days old. While she admired and petted it
wonderingly, I said to her: ‘This pretty little baby came out of Djahid
like the beautiful butterfly came out of the chrysalis, it lay close to
Djahid’s heart, she made it, and kept it there till it grew. She loved
it so much that she made it grow.’ Lilly looked at me with her large,
intelligent eyes in astonishment. ‘Djahid is very happy to have this
pretty baby. Djahid’s blood made it strong while it lay close to her
heart; now Djahid will give it milk, and make it strong, till it will
grow as big as my Lilly. It made Djahid ill and made her suffer when it
was born, but she soon got well, and she is so glad.’ Lily listened,
very much interested, and when she got home, she told her father the
story, forgetting nothing. But beyond that, she did not refer again to
the matter, and soon forgot all about it. The birth of Djahid’s second
baby gave me the opportunity of repeating the little lesson. This time
she asked some questions. I explained many things to the eager little
listener, very simply, and told her that the mother kept the child
within her, and took great care of it until it was old enough to endure
the changes of temperature, etc., and showed her how a mother’s joy and
love made her forget her pain. The little creature, suddenly remembering
that she must have given her mother pain, kissed me tenderly. That was a
flower of love and gratitude, which it was my happiness to see develop
on the fruitful soil of truth. * * * I analyzed a flower, I pointed out
to her the beauty of coloring, the gracefulness of shape, the tender
shades, the difference between the parts composing the flowers.
Gradually, I told her what these parts were called. I showed her the
pollen, which clung like a beautiful golden powder to her little rosy
fingers. I showed her through the microscope that this beautiful powder
was composed of an infinite number of small grains. I made her examine
the pistil more closely, and I showed her, at the end of the tube, the
ovary, which I called a ‘little house full of very tiny children.’ I
showed her the pollen glued to the pistil, and I told her that when the
pollen of one flower, carried away by the wind, or by the insects, fell
on the pistil of another flower, the small grains died, and a tiny drop
of moisture passed through the tube and entered into the little house
where the very tiny children dwelt; that these tiny children were like
small eggs, that in each small egg there was an almost invisible
opening, through which a little of the small drop passed; that when this
drop of pollen mixed with some other wonderful power in the ovary, that
both joined together to give life, and the eggs developed and became
grains or fruit. I have shown her flowers which had only a pistil and
others which had only stamens. I said to her, smiling, that the pistils
were like little mothers, and the stamens like little fathers of the
fruit. * * * Thus I sowed in this innocent heart and searching mind the
seeds of that delicate science, which degenerates into obscenity, if the
mother, through false shame, leaves the instruction of her child to its
schoolfellows. Let my little girl ask me, if she likes, the much dreaded
question; I will only have to remind her of the botany lessons, simply
adding, ‘the same thing happens to human beings, with this difference,
that what is done unconsciously by the plants, is done consciously by
us; that in a properly arranged society one only unites one’s self to
the person one loves.’”—(Translated from “La Revendication des Droits
Feminins,” Shafts, April, 1894, p. 237.)
PAGE 16.—“_The Vulgarization of Love._”
“I have found in my experience that those who seek to draw into the
selfish confines of their own breasts the electric current of Love are
withered by its force and passion. The energy degrades to sensualism if
it has only the Individual channel for expression. The sexual expression
of Love is good and beautiful if normal, but it is not so infallible as
the subtler intercourse of the soul and the affections, or so satisfying
as a comradeship in work for Humanity, and a mental and spiritual
affinity.”—Miriam W. Nicol.
PAGE 24.—“_In the Beauty and Openness of Their Own Bodies._”
“All the loves—if they be heroic and not purely animal, or what is
called natural, and slaves to generation as instruments in some way of
nature—have for object the divinity, and tend towards divine beauty,
which first is communicated to, and shines in, souls; and from them or
rather through them is communicated to bodies; whence it is that
well-ordered affection loves the body or corporeal beauty, insomuch as
it is an indication of beauty of spirit.”—Giordano Bruno, “Gli Eroici
Furori” (dial. iii. 13), trans. by L. Williams.
“In Sparta the spectacle of the naked human body and the natural
treatment of natural things were the best safeguard against the sensual
excitement artificially produced by the modern plan of separating the
sexes from the earliest childhood. The forms of one sex and the
functions of its specific organs were no secret to the other. There was
no possibility of trifling with ambiguities.”—Bebel’s “Woman,” Bellamy
Library, p. 70.
PAGE 26.—_Generation and Nutrition._
“It is in the almost homogeneous fabrics of the cellular plants that we
find the closest connection between the function of nutrition and that
of reproduction; for every one of the vesicles which compose their
fabric is endowed with the power of generating others similar to itself;
and these may extend the parent structure or separate into new and
distinct organisms. Hence it is scarcely possible to draw a line in
these cases, between the nutrition of the individual and the
reproduction of the species.”—W. B. Carpenter, “Principles of Human
Physiology,” sec. 281.
PAGE 42—_Secondary Differences Between the Sexes._
The following are some of the points of difference given by H. Ellis in
“Man and Woman” (Contemporary Science Series):—
The average cranial capacity of men is greater than that of women (as
would be expected from the general proportions of the sexes); but the
difference in this respect between men and women is greater in the
higher civilized races than in the lower and more primitive.
Evidence points on the whole to the cerebellum being, relatively,
distinctly larger in women than in men.
Intellectually, women tend to the personal and concrete, men to the
general and abstract.
Women endure pain, operations, etc., better than men, and show greater
tenacity of life; men are superior in motor perfection, skill, and
muscle. In delicacy of sense-perceptions the two sexes are about equal.
Women show in some respects a greater affectability than men, which is
encouraged by their slight tendency to anaemia, by the greater
development of their vaso-motor system, and by the periodicity of their
functions. They are more hypnotic, the lower—that is, the more primitive
and fundamental—nerve-centers preponderate and are more excitable;
hysteria, ecstasy, and suggestibility, more marked.
Men show a greater tendency to race-variation than women; abnormalities
of various kinds, idiots and geniuses, are commoner amongst males. Man
represents the radical, or experimental element in the life of the race.