Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
[79] The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by
scholars that the physical virtue of "virginity" had been masquerading
under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first,
among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of
chastity, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The
women who preferred to stand outside marriage were "virgins," even though
mothers of large families, and Æschylus speaks of the Amazons as
"virgins," while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always "the
virgin's son." The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek
deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only
virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the goddess of a
nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage,
and she was the goddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances
and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became
the goddess of chastity (Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. ii,
pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W.M. Ramsay, _Cities of Phrygia_, vol. i, p. 96; Paul
Lafargue, "Les Mythes Historiques," _Revue des Idées_, Dec., 1904).
[80] See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.
[81] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi,
cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should,
his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.
[82] _Summa_, Migne's edition, vol. iii, qu. 154, art. I.
[83] See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these _Studies_.
[84] The majority of chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life
(Hellpach, _Nervosität und Kultur_, p. 175), are merely actuated by
traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack
of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a
future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic error, for a woman
lays no importance on intact masculinity. Moreover, he adds, the chaste
man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and
clergymen--the chastest class--that most unhappy marriages are made.
Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.
[85] "In eating," said Hinton, "we have achieved the task of combining
pleasure with an absence of 'lust.' The problem for man and woman is so to
use and possess the sexual passion as to make it the minister to higher
things, with no restraint on it but that. It is essentially connected with
things of the spiritual order, and would naturally revolve round them. To
think of it as merely bodily is a mistake."
[86] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," and Appendix, "The Sexual
Instinct in Savages," in vol. iii of these _Studies_.
[87] I have elsewhere discussed more at length the need in modern
civilized life of a natural and sincere asceticism (see _Affirmations_,
1898) "St. Francis and Others."
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