g in the breach of them. A thing
which is tabooed becomes interesting and more or less awful. The numbers
of the sexes are never exactly equal, and the proportion is further
disturbed by polygamy. Therefore experience of evil and inconvenience
forced some reflection and some judgments as to life policy. Regulations
were devised behind which there was a philosophy of the satisfaction of
interests; that is to say, mores were developed to cover the case. There
seems also to be some connection between sacral harlotry and the
prevention of incest. The poorest who cannot marry or buy slaves have
always practiced incest (sec. 516). Sacral harlotry won another
religious sanction from these cases. In the laws of Hammurabi we find
two classes of women attached to the temple. If the interpretations of
the specialists may be trusted, the arrangement was in one class of
cases in the nature of a life annuity, and those who had no husband had
the god for a husband,--an idea which, with one or another new coloring,
has come down to our own time. That any one should renounce the sex
function was not within the mental horizon of early times. When the
women lived in the temple that fact established conventionalization
about them and gave to their life that regulation which has made decency
and order in all ages. Their case was defined and sanctioned in the
mores. The couples retired outside the temple.[1956] When marriage was
accompanied by very easy divorce and could not be defined except as a
form of property right of the husband, when there were concubines who
were not wives only because they had no property, and slaves who had no
defined relation to the household until they had borne children to the
head of it, the women in the temple might be surrounded by other special
forms of taboo which would give them a status within the mores. They
were "holy" by virtue of their consecration to the goddess.[1957] So far
as we know, their lives were not spent in dissipation. The accounts in
Herodotus and Baruch vi. 43, of the later usage at Babylon show that
there was method and decorum in the institution, and that it was carried
on with conventional dignity. It is our custom to think out the
consistency of all our doctrines and usages. It is certain that ancient
peoples did not do that, just as the masses now do not. They accepted
and lived in unquestioned usage. Therefore we know of cases in classic
society in which maidens and matrons on specia