Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.366

v1.c5.366

this especially 101-248; H. Schurtz, *Urgesch. d. Kultur* (1900), pp. 105 ff.; Ed. Meyer, loc. cit., pp. 15-30. I name these three excellent works, too, because they are written from differing standpoints. Schurtz, indeed, believes that he finds the “way out of the dilemma” in the highly important theory arising out of his studies on “age-classes and men’s associations” (1902, see espec. pp. 54-56), namely, that the “general course of development was this, that the younger men had the utmost freedom of sexual intercourse with all the girls of the tribe, but the older men married” (*Urgesch. d. Kultur*, espec. 123 f.). In which case therefore only the cripples of love, so to say, would have agreed to marriage—just as it happens so often among us. Eduard Meyer, who here often finds himself with Schurtz, even makes the monstrous assertion that “the free union of the sexes, and therefore promiscuous likewise, exists without exception among all peoples and in every community, whether it be that intercourse is left fully free, or whether it is put under fixed regulations, and, for instance, is only allowed between members of certain groups, or whether it is allowed to the girls before marriage, or, as with the widespread religious prostitution, is directly enjoined. . . . Among Christian peoples, in direct contrast to this, free sexual intercourse . . . is officially forbidden, but is not thereby the less zealously practised” (*Gesch. d. Altertums*, i, 1. 3, pp. 17 f.). Things, indeed, are bad enough on this point, but such words give an untrue and distorted picture; in olden and in modern times there are plenty of peoples who give much heed to the girl’s chastity, to say nothing of the married woman; and in civilized Christian mankind there are, in spite of everything, very many chaste wives, and unspotted maids. Here we are not speaking of the men.