CHAPTER VI.
MARRIAGE BY CAPTURE.
I. Rape.—Rape and marriage—Rape in Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Africa, America, among the Tartars, the Hindoos, the Hebrews, and the Celts—The rape of concubines in ancient Greece.
II. Marriage by Capture.—The ceremonial of capture in marriage—Symbolic capture among the Esquimaux, the Indians of Canada, in Guatemala, among the Mongols, the aborigines of Bengal, in New Zealand, among the Arabs, the ancient Greeks, in ancient Rome, in Circassia, among the modern Celts, and in Livonia.
III. Signification of the Ceremonial of Capture.—Violent exogamy has not been universal—Rape and marriage by purchase—What the ceremonial of capture means.
The marriage by capture, which we have now to consider, is not actually a form of marriage; it is only a manner of procuring one or more wives, whatever at the same time may be the prevailing matrimonial régime. If, however, we cannot dispense with the special study of marriage by capture, it is because it has been made to play a chief rôle in sociology. According to some authors, it has been a universal necessity, and must have preceded exogamy in all times and places.
Surely this too general theory may be contested; but it is beyond doubt that the rape of women has been widely practised all over the world, that very often it has been considered glorious, and that in many countries it has been attenuated into pacific marriage.
Nothing is more natural and simple than rape among savage or barbarous tribes, who hold violence in esteem and use it largely, and who, as we have previously seen, are almost always addicted to female infanticide. But has the widely-spread custom of rape the great importance in sociological theory that has been attributed to it? This is a question to which we can only reply after having consulted the facts.
Throughout Melanesia capture has been the primitive means of procuring wives, or rather slaves-of-all-work, absolutely at the discretion of the ravisher. Bonwick, indeed, tells us that in Tasmania, and consequently in Australia, capture was more often simulated only, and resulted from a previous agreement between the man and woman;[213] but the savage manner in which the rape was effected abundantly proves that amiable agreement was exceptional. The Australian who desires to carry off a woman belonging to another tribe prowls traitorously around the camp. If he happens to discover a woman without a protector he rushes on her, stuns her with a blow of his club (douak), seizes her by her thick hair, drags her thus into the neighbouring wood; then, when she has recovered her senses, he obliges her to follow him into the midst of his own people, and there he violates her in their presence, for she has become his property—his domestic animal.[2] The captured woman generally resigns herself without difficulty;[214] in truth, she has, generally, changed her master, but not in the least changed her condition.
Sometimes two men unite to commit one of these rapes. They glide noiselessly into a neighbouring camp in the night; one of them winds round his barbed spear the hair of a sleeping lubra, the other points his spear at her bosom. She awakes, and dares not cry out; they take her off, bind her to a tree, and then return in the same manner to make a second capture; after that they return in triumph to their own people.[215] The captives rarely revolt, for they are, in a way, accustomed to the capture. From infancy they have been familiarised with the fate that awaits them, for the simulation of the rape is one of the games of the Australian children.[216] Later the life of a pretty Australian girl is marked by a series of plots to carry her off, and of successive rapes, which force her to pass from hand to hand, and expose her to wounds received in conflicts, and to bad treatment inflicted by the other women amongst whom she is introduced. Sometimes she is dragged very far, even hundreds of miles from the place of her birth.[217]
It is the duty of the tribe to which the ravished woman belongs to avenge her, and the Australian has, after his own manner, a strong sentiment of certain obligations, which for him are moral; but more frequently, to escape too great damages, the tribes hold a meeting, and the ravisher submits to a symbolic retaliation agreed on beforehand. Armed with his little shield of bark, he takes his place at about forty yards from a group of ten warriors belonging to the aggrieved tribe, and each one of these throws two or three darts at him, which are nearly always avoided or parried. Thenceforth the offence is effaced, and peace re-established.[218]
The same customs prevail among the Papuans of New Guinea. At Bali the men carry off and violate brutally the solitary women they may meet; and afterwards they agree with the tribe as to compensation.[219] In like manner, in the Fiji Isles, rape, real or simulated, was general and even glorious. A particular divinity presided over it. The ravished woman either fled to a protector or resigned herself, and then a feast given to the parents terminated the affair.[220]
To be able to see in these bestial customs anything resembling marriage, one must be a prey to a fixed idea—a positive matrimonial monomania. There is here no marriage by capture, but rather slavery by capture. This is not the only method of procuring wives practised by the Australians. They often proceed pacifically by traffic, and a man acquires a wife by giving in exchange another woman of whom he has power to dispose—a sister or relative.[221] Certain tribes had also instituted a sort of regulated promiscuity—a collective marriage between all the men of one clan and all the women of another. I shall have to return to the consideration of this singular form of sexual association. For the moment I confine myself to noticing that rape is not always obligatory in Australia.
Neither is it so among the negroes of Africa; it is even more rare there than in Melanesia, but there also it does not constitute a marriage. Women are carried off just in the same way as other things are carried off. Thus the Damara Hottentots often steal wives from the Namaquois Hottentots.[222] Among the Mandingos and the Timanis there is no marriage by capture, properly speaking; already they purchase the daughter from her parents, without, of course, consulting her; then the intending purchaser, aided by his friends, carries off his acquisition in a brutal manner, whether she will or not. It is a simple commercial affair; the daughter is an exchange value representing a certain number of jars of palm wine, of stuffs, etc.
Amongst the natives of America brutal rape was, or still is, very common. In Terra del Fuego, the young Fuegians carry off a woman as soon as they are able to construct or procure a canoe.[223] From tribe to tribe the Patagonians at war exterminate the men and carry off the women. The Oen Patagonians make incursions every year at the time of “the red leaf” on the Fuegians to seize their women, their dogs, and their weapons.[224] The Indians on the banks of the Amazon and Orinoco continually capture women, and thus every tribe is sometimes nearly without women and sometimes overflowing with them.[225] The Caribs so frequently procured wives in this way that their women did not often speak the language of the men.[226] In the Redskin tribe of the Mandans the rape of young women was a perpetual cause of trouble, of disorder, and of vengeance, proportioned to the power and to the anger of the relations of the ravished woman.[227]
We find similar customs among savage or barbarous peoples nearly everywhere. The Tartars, says Barnes, make their wives of the prisoners that they capture in battles.[228]
The Code of Manu also mentions this primitive mode of union more or less conjugal:—“When a young girl is carried off by force from the parental house, weeping and crying for succour, and those who oppose this violence are killed or wounded, and a breach is made in the walls, this mode (of marriage) is called that of the giants.”[229]
The Bible relates several facts of the same kind. Thus the tribe of Benjamin procured themselves wives by massacring the inhabitants of Jabez-Gilead and capturing four hundred of their virgins. Another time the Benjamites practised a Sabine rape in carrying off the women during a feast near Bethel.
The Israelites, having vanquished the Midianites, killed all the men, according to the Semitic custom, and took away the cattle, the children, and the women.[230] But Moses, always directly inspired by the Lord, ordered them to put to death the women and even the male children, and to keep the young girls and virgins.[231] There were sixteen thousand maidens, of whom thirty-two were reserved for the Lord’s share, which doubtless means for the priests. Of the sheep, oxen, asses, and maidens that remained, Moses further deducted the fiftieth part, which he gave to the Levites of the tabernacle.[232]
This ferocity and this coarse assimilation of captured women to cattle are not peculiar to the people of God, but prevailed amongst the primitive Arabs,[233] or rather amongst all the Semites, who were still savage or barbarous.
Capture in war has, besides, been largely practised by all races and throughout the world. An old Irish poem, the “Duan Eiranash,” speaks of three hundred women carried off by the Picts from the Gaels, who, finding themselves thus deprived of their women by a single blow, allied themselves then with the Irish.
I will confine myself to these examples, gleaned from all parts, and which it would be easy to multiply. They amply suffice to establish that in primitive societies woman, being held in very low esteem, is absolutely reduced to the level of chattels and of domestic animals; that she represents a booty like any other; that her master can use and abuse her without fear. But in these bestial practices there is nothing which approaches, even distantly, to marriage, and we are not in the least warranted to call these brutal rapes marriages. Even in the countries where a true marriage exists, the customs and the laws tolerate for a long time the introduction into the house of the husband of captured slaves, who are treated by the master as concubines by the side of the legitimate wife or wives. The heroes of Homer profit largely by this legal tolerance, and when the Clytemnestra of Æschylus justifies herself for having killed her husband, she alleges, among other extenuating circumstances, the intimacy of Agamemnon with his slave Cassandra.
Assuredly in all this there is no marriage. We shall presently see that in many countries the concubinate, legal and patent, has co-existed, or co-exists, by the side of marriage without being confounded with it. It is important to reserve the name of marriage by capture to legal and pacific marriage, in the ceremonial of which we find practices recalling or simulating by survival the primitive rape of woman.
It is to be observed that this symbolic rape does not always signify that the capture of the woman has preceded pacific conjugal union. It represents especially a mental survival, the tradition of an epoch, more or less distant, when violence was held in high esteem, and when it was glorious to procure slaves for all sorts of labour by force of arms. In the countries where the ceremonial of capture exists, the fine times of rape are generally somewhat gone by, but the mind is still haunted by it, and even in peaceful marriages, after the contract or bargain is concluded, men like to symbolise in the ceremonial the rapes of former days, which they cannot and dare not any longer commit. These practices have also another bearing: they signify that the bride, then nearly always purchased from her parents, must be in complete subjection to the master that has been given her, and occupy the humblest place in the conjugal house.
For all these reasons the symbolic ceremonial of capture has been, or is still, in use with many races at the celebration of their marriages. In some degree it is found all over the world. Among the Esquimaux of Cape York the marriages are arranged in a friendly way by the parents of the future couple, and nevertheless, from the infancy of the latter, the conjugal ceremony must simulate a capture. The future bride must fly, must defend herself with her feet and hands, scream at the height of her voice, until her new master has succeeded in taking her to his hut, where she at once settles happily.[234]
In the same way, in Greenland the bridegroom captures his bride, or has her captured for him; and in the latter case he has recourse to the help of two or three old women.[235]
With the Indians of Canada, where sometimes a true marriage is concluded in presence of the chief of the tribe, when he has pronounced the matrimonial formula, “the husband turns round, stoops down, takes his wife on his back, and carries her to his tent, amid the acclamations of the spectators.”[236]
Some Redskin tribes, observed by Lafitau, symbolised rape even in the intimate relations between young couples. The husband was obliged to enter the wigwam of his wife in the night; it would be a grave impropriety for him to approach it in the day-time.[237]
In ancient Guatemala, where marriages were celebrated with a certain pomp, the father of the bridegroom sent a deputation of friends to seek the bride, and one of these messengers had to take the girl on his shoulders and carry her to an appointed spot, near the house of the bridegroom.[238]
In Asia, over the vast Mongol region extending from Kamtschatka to the country of the Turcomans, the ceremonial of capture is always held in honour.
This symbolism of capture is especially curious with the Kamtschatdales. There it is not as a conqueror that the husband enters the family of the wife, since he must first do an act of servitude, find the parents of the girl he desires, put himself at their service, and take his part in the domestic labour. This period of probation may last a long time, even years,[239] and surely it is a singular prelude to a marriage by violent capture. However, when the time of the novitiate is over, the future husband is allowed to triumph violently and publicly over the resistance of his bride. She is armed with thick garments, one over the other, and with straps and cords. Besides this she is guarded and defended by the women of the iourte. However, the marriage is not definitely concluded until the bridegroom, surmounting all these obstacles, succeeds in effecting on his well-defended bride a sort of outrage on modesty, that she herself must acknowledge by crying ni ni in a plaintive tone. But the girls and women of the guard fall on the assailant with great cries and blows, tear his hair, scratch his face, and sometimes throw him. Victory often necessitates repeated assaults and many days of combat. When at last it is gained, and the bride has herself acknowledged it, the marriage is settled, and is consummated the same evening in the iourte of the bride, who is not taken to her husband’s house till the next day.[240]
The ceremonial of capture still continues in the marriages of the Kalmucks, the Tungouses, and the Turcomans, but has become less coarse.
With the Kalmucks the girl is first bought from her father, and then, after a pretended resistance, is carried away on a horse ready saddled.[241] The custom varies: sometimes it is enough to place the bride, by force, on a horse; sometimes she flees, always on horseback, but is pursued and caught by the bridegroom, who consummates the marriage on the spot, and then conducts his prize to his tent.[242]
The Tungouses, coarser still, proceed by an attempt on modesty, as with the Kamtschatdales; the bridegroom must attack his bride and tear her clothes.[243]
With the Turcomans, marriage can be concluded with or without the consent of the parents. In the latter case, the young people fly and seek refuge in a neighbouring obah. They are always well received there, and remain a month or six weeks. During this time the elders of the two obahs negotiate an arrangement with the parents; they agree on the price of the girl, who afterwards returns to the paternal domicile; she must remain six months or a year, or even longer, before living with her husband, and during all this time he may only see her secretly. Sometimes the flight is executed with the previous consent of the parents, and then it is no more than a symbolic capture,[244] a comedy.
In reality rape, more or less real, is often replaced by a simple ceremonial with the greater part of the nomads of Central Asia, and notably the Turcomans. Then the young girl, clothed in her bridal costume, bestrides a fiery horse, which she puts to a gallop, having at the saddle a kid or a lamb freshly killed. The bridegroom and all the wedding guests, also on horseback, pursue the future wife, who, by clever turns and evolutions, hides herself, and hinders them from seizing the animal she has carried off.[245] All this is plainly the mere mimic of rape, and there is in these divers customs a designed gradation: at first the actual stealing of the girl, with the understanding that the affair will not end tragically; then a stealing that may be called legal, as it is authorised by the parents; at length the simple ceremony symbolic of rape by violence.
Customs very similar to these are found with a certain number of the aborigines of Bengal.
The Kurmis and other sudras celebrate marriage by a pretended combat. Sometimes the bridegrooms mark their foreheads with blood, which seems, indeed, to be the origin of the singular and nearly universal custom in India of the sindradan,[246] consisting of marking the forehead of the bride with vermilion. The vermilion has apparently replaced the blood, and the blood may, and doubtless does, symbolise a violent rape.
With the Mecks and the Kacharis, the bridegroom, accompanied by his friends, goes to the house of his future bride; he there meets the friends of the latter, and the two troupes simulate a combat, in which the future husband is always victor; the bride finishes by being carried off, and her husband has only to feast the friends of both parties, and pay the father the price of the girl.[247]
With the Soligas, the man carries away the young girl with her consent, and goes, like the Mongols, to a neighbouring village to pass the time of the honeymoon, after which the couple return home and give a feast.[248]
The custom of simulated capture still exists among other aboriginal tribes of India, the Khonds, Badagas, etc.
It is evident that in primitive humanity, to carry off a woman with armed violence was considered a glorious exploit, since in the most diverse races pacific marriage assumes, with such good will, the pretence of violent conquest.
In New Zealand, in order to marry a girl, a man applied either to her father or nearest relation; then, consent being obtained, he ravished his future bride, who was bound to resist energetically. As the New Zealand women were robust, the contest, however courteous it might be, was severe; the clothes of the girl were generally torn to shreds, and it sometimes took hours to drag her a hundred yards.[249]
Sometimes the mother of the bride interfered. Mr. Yate mentions a case of this kind. It relates to a mother quite content with the marriage of her daughter, but obliged by custom to make a show of violent opposition. The newly-married couple, on coming out of the church, for they were converted, met the old woman, vociferating and tearing her hair, and abusing the missionary, but telling him at the same time in a low voice not to mind, for she was not serious.[250]
In certain districts of New Zealand the future husband was obliged literally to carry off the girl. When the marriage was negotiated and, in principle, concluded, all the relatives watched the fiancée with the greatest care, and held themselves in readiness to defend her. The young man had to seize his bride at all costs by force of arms; his honour depended on it, and often he suffered severely in conducting his glorious enterprise to a successful end.[251]
The ceremonial of capture evidently springs from customs of rape, whether ancient or not; it is, therefore, quite natural to meet with razzias among the Bedouins, as among all of their race. With the Bedouins of Sinai, the comedy is played to the life. The bridegroom, accompanied by a couple of friends, attacks the girl when she is leading the flocks home. She defends herself vigorously by throwing stones, and is esteemed according to the amount of energy she shows. At length they finish by taking her to the tent of her father, where the name of her future husband is proclaimed. After this the girl is dressed as a bride, placed on a camel, all the time feigning resistance, and conducted to the encampment. A feast and presents terminate the ceremony.[252]
With the Mezeyn Arabs things are pushed further. The girl, in the so-called capture, evades pursuit and takes refuge in the mountains, where her friends have prepared provisions for her beforehand. The bridegroom rejoins his future wife in her retreat, and it is there that the marriage is consummated. After this the couple return to the paternal domicile, which the woman, unless she is with child, does not quit for a year.
The matrimonial comedy is not always so complicated. With the Amezas the bride only runs from tent to tent, and is at last conducted by several women to a tent prepared at some distance; her bridegroom awaits her there, but he has to force her to enter it; that done, the women retire.[253]
With the Moors of Java, relates Schouten, the father of the bride carries her, all swathed up, to the bridegroom. The latter, aided by two of his paranymphs, lifts her on a horse and rides away with her. Once arrived at his house he hides his wife there and goes off, without thanking his assistants and friends.
Many European races have also practised the ceremonial of marriage by capture. The Bœotians, says Pausanias, conducted the wives to the house of the husband in a chariot, of which they afterwards solemnly burnt the pole, to indicate that the woman was henceforth the property of her master, and was never to think of quitting his abode. But in ancient Greece it was at Sparta especially that the nuptial ceremony of capture was practised.[254] A frequently quoted passage from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus gives us details on this point. “In their marriages the bridegroom carried off the bride by violence; and she was never chosen in a tender age, but when she had arrived at full maturity. Then the woman that had the direction of the wedding cut the bride’s hair close to the skin, dressed her in a man’s clothes, laid her upon a mattress, and left her in the dark. The bridegroom, neither oppressed with wine nor enervated with luxury, but perfectly sober, as having always supped at the common table, went in privately, untied her girdle, and carried her to another bed. Having stayed there a short time, he modestly retired to his usual apartment to sleep with the other young men, and observed the same conduct afterwards, spending the day with his companions and reposing himself with them in the night, nor even visiting his bride but with great caution and apprehensions of being discovered by the rest of the family; the bride at the same time exerted all her art to contrive convenient opportunities for their private meetings,” etc.[255]
At Rome the ceremonial of capture was kept up for a long time in the plebeian marriages, without confarreation or coemption. As in so many other countries, they played the comedy of the carrying off of the bride by the bridegroom with the pretended resistance of the mother and the relations.[256] In the more respectable marriages the ceremonial of capture was simplified, but still very significant. The hair of the bride was separated with the point of a javelin (hasta celibaris),[257] and for this symbolic ceremony a javelin that had pierced the body of a gladiator was preferred. Then the bride, conducted to the house of her husband, was to enter it without touching the threshold; she was lifted over it.[258] It is curious to find this same custom in China now in our own day, and we can hardly help recognising in it the symbolic embodiment of capture.
A similar ceremonial is always practised in Circassia. In the midst of a feast the bridegroom enters, escorted by his friends, and carries off his bride, who henceforth becomes his wife.[259]
Moreover, as at Sparta, the newly-married Circassian must not visit the wife, except in secret, for a whole year—a term evidently fixed, as at Sparta, for the period of probable pregnancy.[260]
It is not very long ago that a ceremonial of the same kind was observed quite near us, in Wales. On the day fixed, the bridegroom and his friends, all on horseback, came to take the bride; but they found themselves in the presence of the friends of the young girl, also on horseback, and a mock fight ensued, during which the future wife fled on the crupper of the horse of her nearest relative. But instantly the squadron of the bridegroom, counting sometimes two or three hundred horse, galloped in pursuit. Finally they rejoined the fugitive, and all was terminated by a feast and common rejoicings.[261]
In Livonia every marriage was also the occasion of a simulated combat of cavalry, as with the Welsh, but it took place before the marriage.[262] In Poland also, and in Lithuania and Russia, the seizure of the girl often preceded marriage.
I shall here end the enumeration of these customs, which are all manifestly symbolical of capture. We still find the trace of it even in the Brittany of to-day, where the representative of the husband, the bazvalan, and the parents of the fiancée sing, alternately, strophes of a marriage song, in which the one asks and the others refuse the bride, offering in her stead either a younger sister, or the mother or grandmother.[263] Our inquiry is terminated; it remains now to ask what is the meaning of this ceremonial so widely spread in all ages and in all countries.
III. Signification of the Ceremonial of Capture.
The author of an interesting book on primitive marriage, Mr. McLennan, and after him a great number of sociologists, have concluded that in savage societies sexual unions or associations have been generally effected by the violent capture of the woman, that by degrees these captures have become friendly ones, and have at length ended in a peaceful exogamy, retaining the ancient custom only in the ceremonial form.
It is quite possible to have been thus in a certain number of countries; but we must beware of seeing in this a necessary and general evolution. Surely savage hordes and tribes naturally carry off the women and girls of their neighbours and enemies, the little groups with whom they are incessantly struggling for existence. They seize their women as they do everything else, and impose on the captives the unenviable rôle of slaves-of-all-work. Given the brutality of primitive man, the fate of the captured woman is necessarily of the hardest, and it is natural that the woman of the tribe should not solicit it. Thus, with or without reason, the Australian fells to the ground his captured wife, pierces her limbs with his javelin, etc. A stranger, a prisoner, violently brought into a society where she cannot count on a single friend, will evidently be more resigned to this bad treatment, and can nearly always be made to submit to it without resistance. But we must not accept this as a sufficient explanation of exogamy. We have seen that the Australian, accustomed to primitive rape in all its brutality, only has recourse to it when he cannot procure by simple barter the woman he covets.
There is certainly great temptation to capture a woman. A man thereby escapes paying a price for her to her parents, which is the rule in nearly all savage countries, but the operation is not effected without risk and reprisals more or less dangerous, so that before undertaking it he thinks twice.
We must be careful not to confound rape with marriage; nothing is more distinct with savage and even with civilised men. Perhaps even the dangers and the inconveniences of brutal capture have given rise to the idea of primitive conjugal barter, of a peaceful agreement by which a girl was ceded to a man for a compensation agreed upon. In principle this commercial transaction left to the husband the greater part of the rights he would have acquired by violent capture; but, in reality, these rights were necessarily mitigated, for the woman, being thus ceded in a friendly manner, was not completely abandoned by her own people.
Thus in Polynesia, or at least in New Zealand, the husband who murdered his wife, although he had purchased her, incurred the revenge of her relations, unless she was guilty of adultery.[264] It was often thus, but not always, however; for with the Fijians, in delivering a daughter to the purchaser, the father or the brother said to the future husband, “If you become discontented with her, sell her, kill her, eat her; you are her absolute master.”[265] Much nearer home, in ancient Russia, the father at the moment of marriage gave his daughter some strokes with a whip, saying, “Henceforth, if you are not obedient, your husband will beat you.”[266]
Such customs show us plainly why, in so many countries, symbolic practices recalling violent capture are kept up in the ceremony of marriage. In the first place, by reason even of the dangers to which it exposed the ravisher, rape was considered a brilliant action, and pleasure was felt in simulating it. But besides and beyond all, the ceremonial of capture symbolised also the subjection of the woman sold or ceded by her parents; it sanctioned the very excessive rights that the husband acquired over the wife. As a rule, the ceremonial of capture coincides with a very great subjection of the woman, even where it is only a very distant survival. At Sparta, for example, the wife might still be lent by the husband, and it was the same in ancient Rome, where she was, according to the legal expression, in manu, assimilated to slaves, and where the pater familias had the right of life and death over her.
We are, therefore, warranted in believing that in civilised countries where conjugal legislation is still derived from the Roman law, the subordinate position assigned to woman is the last vestige of primitive marriage by capture or by rape, attenuated to a purchase, as practised in the earliest times of the Romans.