Preachers still shudderingly refer to one of the "abominations" of ancient Babylon. They tell how the women had to go to the temple and have commerce with a man before they could marry; how little crowds of the less pretty women might be seen at the door soliciting the interest of casual sailors and other men of little taste and much feeling. As Frazer strangely repeats this in his Golden Bough, there is some excuse for the preacher. But, as we see in Morals in Ancient Babylon (No. 1076) we now know that it is an entire falsification of life in the city of Babylon. There were, however, temples (and probably an old one in Babylonia) where this was done, and where there were sacred prostitutes.
From the last part of the last chapter the reader will now begin to have an idea of the meaning of this strange perversion of religion and ethics. These were relies of the middle stage of man's religious evolution. The spirit of generation, in man and in nature, was just as likely to he deified as the sun and moon. The act of generation then became in a sense a religious act. The god or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition.
Moreover, it was socially a very desirable thing. The army wanted men: the men wanted wives and slaves. Disease and war wrought terrible havoc, and population was urgently needed. The development of polygamy, which is not a primitive institution, was scarcely enough. Concubines were allowed. It suited the masculine nature.
On the other hand, it came to be believed that human copulation could influence the fertility of the earth, by a sort of sympathetic magic. When scientific men find drawings of deer in a prehistoric cavern, they tell the whole world. It was magic. The artist believed he could bring the animals nearer and have a profitable hunt. When the same scientific men find a drawing of a male organ, or a woman with an exaggerated pubic part carved out of a bit of mammoth's tusk, they say, "How naughty," and shut it away. Why not the same magic?
At all events it is certain—the belief and practices based upon it lingered in Europe in the Middle Ages—that men came to believe that by human generation they prompted the fertility of mother earth. This easily led to what we call license or promiscuity. The great nature-festivals were marked by orgies of sex-pleasure; especially as there was prodigious eating and drinking. Priests of the goddess discovered, to their advantage, that it was particularly fortunate for women to have commerce with them. Priestesses were not likely to avoid the act of which their goddess was the presiding genius. Large carvings of the sex-organs stood unblushingly in the temples: until Englishmen and Americans came along in the nineteenth century.
All this is a very long and fascinating story—so much so that it has been given a special Little Blue Book, Phallic Elements in Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1079)—and we shall find startling traces of it even in the Old Testament. Here I can only show in a general way that the eccentricities of conscience in this connection are part of a quite natural development.
Just as natural and intelligible-that is to say, from the evolutionary point of view, and no other—is another very large category of perversions of conscience which, perhaps, are the greatest causes of people's contempt of their lowly relatives. In science "savage" means a being at a low stage of intellect and culture. To the general public it means a blood-thirsty, cruel, scalp-seeking or head-hunting monster.
Savagery in this sense is not a primitive quality of man. Those lowest fragments of the human race to which I have often referred are not at all "savage." The Tasmanians, it is true, were so wicked as to fight for their land when Europeans wanted it. The Maoris, Red Indians, and others were equally wicked. But at the most primitive level man is peaceful and honest. We saw that.
At that level man is neither a hunter (except in a very small way) nor an agriculturist. He has no "tribes." And, to cut a long story short—a process to which I am becoming sadly resigned in these little books—(I wish they were three times as long)—the development of hunting gave man a taste for blood, and the crystallizing of human groups into distinct tribes, with rival hunting grounds, gave men a great taste for each other's blood. The peaceful Yahgan type was succeeded by the less peaceful (but not bad) Australian type, and this by the fierce South American Indian, the Dyak head-hunter, the Fiji cannibal, the terrible Zulu, and so on.