The precautions prescribed as
regards coitus at Loango[39] are evidently associated with religious
fears. In Ceylon, again (as a medical correspondent there informs me),
where the penis is worshipped and held sacred, a native never allows it to
be seen, except under compulsion, by a doctor, and even a wife must
neither see it nor touch it nor ask for coitus, though she must grant as
much as the husband desires. All savage and barbarous peoples who have
attained any high degree of ceremonialism have included the functions not
only of sex, but also of excretion, more or less stringently within the
bounds of that ceremonialism.[40] It is only necessary to refer to the
Jewish ritual books of the Old Testament, to Hesiod, and to the customs
prevalent among Mohammedan peoples. Modesty in eating, also, has its roots
by no means only in the fear of causing disgust, but very largely in this
kind of ritual, and Crawley has shown how numerous and frequent among
primitive peoples are the religious implications of eating and
drinking.[41] So profound is this dread of the sacred mystery of sex, and
so widespread is the ritual based upon it, that some have imagined that
here alone we may find the complete explanation of modesty, and Salomon
Reinach declares that "at the origin of the emotion of modesty lies a
taboo."[42]
Durkheim ("La Prohibition de l'Inceste," _L'Annee Sociologique_,
1898, p.
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