Thus a ‘religious’ dread attaches among savages (the theory holds) to all marriages; all are novelties, new steps in life, and therefore are so far ‘sinful’ that they involve a peril, vague but awful, the creation of superstition. Marriages contrary to the exogamous rule, are only especially and inexplicably bad cases of the ‘sin’--that is, mystic danger--of marital relations in general, as I understand Mr. Crawley. Marriage ceremonies of every kind are devised to avoid ‘sin,’ as our Marriage Service candidly states, using ‘sin’ in the Christian sense of the word. But there are savage marriages, those forbidden by the law of exogamy, which, as a general rule, no ceremony can render other than sinful. So great and terrible is the danger of such marriages--namely, among many savages, between persons of the same totem, that it threatens the whole community, just as the marriage of Charles I. with a Catholic bride caused the Plague, according to the Rev. Mr. Row, and therefore such unions are punished by the death penalty, and are but seldom left to the automatic vengeance of the tabu. Foremost in this black list of sins are the unions of brothers and sisters of the full blood, though, we must remember, these are not more heavily punished than marriage between a man and woman of the same totem, even if the pair come together from opposite ends of the continent, and are not blood relations at all. Why is this? As I understand Mr. Crawley, the sexes, in savagery, avoid each other’s society in everyday life, partly from ‘sexual tabu’--the result of the superstitions already indicated; partly because of ‘sexual solidarity,’ perhaps even of ‘sexual antipathy.’ In fact, men and women are often very much in each other’s way. We do not want women in our clubs and smoking-rooms--nor do savages--and we despise a man who lurks in drawing-rooms when his fellows are out of doors; a man who is a pillar of luncheon parties and of afternoon tea. But this separation of the sexes is especially rigid between the children of the same hearth, even among nomads. The boys go with the father, the girls with the mother. The manlike apes have the same ideas. ‘Diard was told by the Malays, and he found it afterwards to be true, that the young Siamangs, when in their helpless state, are carried about by their parents, the males by the father, the females by the mother.’ ‘The nests ... are only occupied by the female and young, the male passing the night in a fork of the same tree or another tree in the vicinity.’[43]