Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c11.143

v2.c11.143

¹ When drunk a person shows his true nature (Çiçup., x, 18; Rāvaṇav., x, 80). And woman's nature and calling is love, and: “Every woman is at heart a rake,” as Pope says. This, acccording to Kirāt., ix, 54, is brought out by intoxicating drink. But it shakes the morality of the fair (MBh., vi, 77.61).—According to Gobhila's Gṛihyasūtra, at the wedding the bride, after the wedding oracle, is sprinkled with surā, so that her whole body is moistened with it, and at the same time this formula is spoken: “Kāma, I know thy name, intoxication is thy name.” On the Brahmanic view, indeed, not only is spirit-drinking (surāpāna) in itself one of the four deadly sins, and holding the threat of dreadful punishments in this world and the other, but also women's offending is heavily condemned. A woman who partakes of spirituous drink is set on the same level as the murderess of her husband, or as one using abortion, and so forth; and for her, as for the suicide and other great sinners, no death-gift must be made (Manu, v, 89 f., cp. ix, 13.80). The Brahman woman who thus sins cannot come after death into the world of her husband, but is cast out into the lowest births of all (Vasisṭha, xxi, 11). And intercourse with a spirit-drinking woman is a serious offence (Vishṇu, xxxvii, 33; cp. Vas., xxi, 15); and he who sees a woman of good family (kulastrī) drinking surā, must look at the sun to cleanse himself, utter Vishṇu's name, and bathe in the clothes he has on his body at the time of the ill-omened sight (Mahānirvāṇatantra, xi, 163 f., cp. 122). This last-named, highly instructive work, translated by Manmatha Nath Dutt (better by Arthur Avalon, with an excellent introduction, Luzac and Co., 1913), as a Tantra book, praises surā, indeed, in the most dissolute phrases—this freer of living beings, this annihilator of all sins, this mother of pleasure and release, this augmenter of under-