ed.

+512. Abomination of incest.+ The taboos in the mores contain
prescriptions as to the allowable consanguinity of spouses. There is a
great horror of violating them. This sentiment is met with amongst
people who have scarcely any other notion of crime, or of right and
wrong. The rules are enforced by death or banishment as penalties of
violation. The notion of harm in inbreeding has spread all over the
earth. It has come down to ourselves. In the form in which it was held
by savage people it was mistaken to such a degree that they might, in
spite of it, practice close inbreeding. Our study of the mores teaches
us that there must have been, antecedent to this state of the mores in
regard to this matter, a long development of interests, folkways, rites,
and superstitions.[1663] It is believed, not without reason, that the
horde life would tend to run into grooves in which the prescribed wife
would be a close relative, in the final case a sister. Experience of
this might produce the rules of prohibition. The captured wife was also
a trophy, and the play of this fact on vanity would always tend to
disintegrate the system of endogamy. There are many reasons why endogamy
seems more primitive than exogamy, and it required force of interest,
superstition, or vanity to carry a society over from the former to the
latter. A calamity might come to reenforce the interest,[1664] but can
hardly be postulated to explain a custom so widespread. All the ultimate
causes of the law of incest, therefore, lie beyond our investigation.
They are open only to conjecture and speculation. The case is very
important, however, to show the operation of the mores on facts
erroneously assumed, and their power to work out their effects, as an
independent societal operation, without regard to error in the material
to which they are applied.

+513. Incest taboo strongest in the strongest groups.+ We shall see, in
the cases to be presented, that incest has a wider definition and a
stricter compulsion in great tribes, and in prosperity or wealth, than
in small groups and poverty. The definiteness of this taboo, and the
strictness with which it is enforced, seem to be correlative with the
energy of the tribal discipline in general and the vigor of the
collective life of the group. Wives can be got abroad, either by capture
or contract, only by those who command respect for their power or who
use power. On the other hand, endogamy is both cause and effe