virgins

• bearing child before marriage increased girl’s desirability among primitives

82:3.13In olden days many prac­tices now re­garded as im­moral were en­cour­aged. Prim­i­tive wives not in­fre­quently took great pride in their hus­bands’ af­fairs with other women. Chastity in girls was a great hin­drance to mar­riage; the bear­ing of a child be­fore mar­riage greatly in­creased a girl’s de­sir­abil­ity as a wife since the man was sure of hav­ing a fer­tile com­pan­ion.

• virgin daughters were commercial asset to fathers

82:4.5Since the chastity taboo had its ori­gin as a phase of the prop­erty mores, it ap­plied at first to mar­ried women but not to un­mar­ried girls. In later years, chastity was more de­manded by the fa­ther than by the suitor; a vir­gin was a com­mer­cial as­set to the fa­ther—she brought a higher price. As chastity came more into de­mand, it was the prac­tice to pay the fa­ther a bride fee in rec­og­ni­tion of the ser­vice of prop­erly rear­ing a chaste bride for the hus­band-to-be. When once started, this idea of fe­male chastity took such hold on the races that it be­came the prac­tice lit­er­ally to cage up girls, ac­tu­ally to im­prison them for years, in or­der to as­sure their vir­gin­ity. And so the more re­cent stan­dards and vir­gin­ity tests au­to­mat­i­cally gave ori­gin to the pro­fes­sional pros­ti­tute classes; they were the re­jected brides, those women who were found by the grooms’ moth­ers not to be vir­gins.

• primitives restricted bathing practices of

84:1.3Mar­riage was not even brought about by the con­scious re­al­iza­tion of the obli­ga­tions of sex re­la­tions. Prim­i­tive man com­pre­hended no con­nec­tion be­tween sex in­dul­gence and the sub­se­quent birth of a child. It was once uni­ver­sally be­lieved that a vir­gin could be­come preg­nant. The sav­age early con­ceived the idea that ba­bies were made in spir­it­land; preg­nancy was be­lieved to be the re­sult of a woman’s be­ing en­tered by a spirit, an evolv­ing ghost. Both diet and the evil eye were also be­lieved to be ca­pa­ble of caus­ing preg­nancy in a vir­gin or un­mar­ried woman, while later be­liefs con­nected the be­gin­nings of life with the breath and with sun­light.

84:1.4Many early peo­ples as­so­ci­ated ghosts with the sea; hence vir­gins were greatly re­stricted in their bathing prac­tices; young women were far more afraid of bathing in the sea at high tide than of hav­ing sex re­la­tions. De­formed or pre­ma­ture ba­bies were re­garded as the young of an­i­mals which had found their way into a woman’s body as a re­sult of care­less bathing or through malev­o­lent spirit ac­tiv­ity. Sav­ages, of course, thought noth­ing of stran­gling such off­spring at birth.

• custom for priests to have initial intercourse with

84:4.5Men have long re­garded women as pe­cu­liar, even ab­nor­mal. They have even be­lieved that women did not have souls; there­fore were they de­nied names. Dur­ing early times there ex­isted great fear of the first sex re­la­tion with a woman; hence it be­came the cus­tom for a priest to have ini­tial in­ter­course with a vir­gin. Even a woman’s shadow was thought to be dan­ger­ous.

• dedicated to tending sacred temple fires

85:4.4Fire was mixed up with magic in the minds of prim­i­tive fear-rid­den mor­tals. A devo­tee of magic will vividly re­mem­ber one pos­i­tive chance re­sult in the prac­tice of his magic for­mu­las, while he non­cha­lantly for­gets a score of neg­a­tive re­sults, out-and-out fail­ures. Fire rev­er­ence reached its height in Per­sia, where it long per­sisted. Some tribes wor­shiped fire as a de­ity it­self; oth­ers revered it as the flam­ing sym­bol of the pu­ri­fy­ing and purg­ing spirit of their ven­er­ated de­i­ties. Vestal vir­gins were charged with the duty of watch­ing sa­cred fires, and in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury can­dles still burn as a part of the rit­ual of many re­li­gious ser­vices.

• dedicated to tending sacred temple fires

89:8.1Sac­ri­fi­cial re­demp­tion and tem­ple pros­ti­tu­tion were in re­al­ity mod­i­fi­ca­tions of hu­man sac­ri­fice. Next came the mock sac­ri­fice of daugh­ters. This cer­e­mony con­sisted in blood­let­ting, with ded­i­ca­tion to life­long vir­gin­ity, and was a moral re­ac­tion to the older tem­ple har­lotry. In more re­cent times vir­gins ded­i­cated them­selves to the ser­vice of tend­ing the sa­cred tem­ple fires.

• religious leaders conceived as being born of

92:5.6Many races have con­ceived of their lead­ers as be­ing born of vir­gins; their ca­reers are lib­er­ally sprin­kled with mirac­u­lous episodes, and their re­turn is al­ways ex­pected by their re­spec­tive groups. In cen­tral Asia the tribes­men still look for the re­turn of Genghis Khan; in Ti­bet, China, and In­dia it is Bud­dha; in Is­lam it is Mo­hammed; among the Amerinds it was Hes­unanin Ona­mo­na­lon­ton; with the He­brews it was, in gen­eral, Adam’s re­turn as a ma­te­rial ruler. In Baby­lon the god Mar­duk was a per­pet­u­a­tion of the Adam leg­end, the son-of-God idea, the con­nect­ing link be­tween man and God. Fol­low­ing the ap­pear­ance of Adam on earth, so-called sons of God were com­mon among the world races.