Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c8.32

v1.c8.32

makes anyone ucchiṣṭa (usually he that has not yet undertaken the needful washings after eating), açuci (unclean), and kṣudra (low, common), and thereby fall a victim to their destroying power. And they answer among other things: “Through copulation men become ever ucchiṣṭa, and if they have practised the ‘upside-down’” (xii, 131.4)¹. And in the golden age there was no sexual union whatever. So we find in xii, 207.37 ff.: “So long as men chose to retain the body, so long they lived; there was no fear of death. Nor did they know either the custom of copulation; their offspring came into being through the mere wish. In the days of the Tretāyuga (silver age) thereafter, the children were begotten by touch; for they, too, had not the custom of copulation. In the Dvāpara age arose among creatures the custom of copulation.” In our own evil or Kali age it is now needful; but it is regulated. It must not be practised in the open air (ākāçe, xii, 228.45; cp. Meyer, *Altind. Rechtsschr.*, 237), and must be practised secretly (xiii, 162.47; xii, 193.17²); in the latter passage is added that it must also be in lawful wise, which may mean the restriction to one's own wife, but according to Nil. refers to the ṛitu. Then there is only the vulva for it; done in the mouth it is a crime (vii, 73.43). The āsyamaithuna is also named as one of the dreadful things making their appearance towards the end of the world: Bahuprajāḥ, hrasvadehāḥ, çīlācāravarjitāḥ, mukhebhagāḥ striyo, rājan, bhaviṣyanti yugakshaye (iii, 188.41; cp. vii, 73.38 ff.).¹ So, too, homosexuality is a dreadful sin: “The blind ones, evil-livers, very foolish ones, however, who find their delight in intercourse with a base womb (especially of an animal, but also of a woman of low rank) (viyonau), and with men, are born again as men incapable of begetting” (xiii, 145.52).² Here, too, seems to belong the passage from the description of the evil state of things at the time when a world age is coming to its end: “Men and women will walk their ways after their own wishes, and not be able to suffer one another, when the end of a yuga has come about. Then, when the end of the world is at hand, the woman will not find content with her husband, nor the man with his wife ” (iii, 190.45, 50).¹ And you shall not be a thrall to the pleasures of love, when you celebrate a sacrifice to the forefathers (çrāddha). The çrāddhamaithunika is set before us, in vii, 17.32, as a great sinner. All those taking part are then bound to keep chaste. “ It is held that on this day copulation is to be avoided. It is as one pure that you shall always partake of the death-meal (çrāddha). He that gives or shares in a death-meal, and goes to a woman, his fathers must lie that month in the seed ” (xiii, 125.42, 24).² Further, we find (xiii, 104.29) : “ In the first night of the new moon, in the night of the full moon, in the fourteenth night and in the eighth night of each half of the month you shall always practise complete chastity.” ³