Primitive Marriage Author:John Ferguson McLennan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE ORIGIN OF THE FORM OF CAPTURE. The question now arises, what is the meaning and what the origin of a ceremony so widely spread, that alrea... more »dy on the threshold of our inquiry, the reader must be prepared to find it connected with some universal tendency of mankind ? Those who approach the subject with minds undisturbed by the views of Festus and Muller will most naturally think, in the first instance, of an early period of lawlessness, in which it was with women as with other kinds of property, that he should take who had the power, and he should keep who could. And it is a trite fact, that women captured in war haveuniversally, in barbarous times and countries, been appropriated as wives, or as worse. But little consideration is needed to see that the symbol implies much more than this; for it is impossible to believe that the mere lawlessness of savages should be consecrated into a legal symbol, or to assign a reason—could this be believed— why a similar symbol should not appear in transferences of other kinds of property. To a certain extent, indeed, the first impression must be held to be a correct one. We cannot escape the conclusion that there was a stage in the history of tribes observing this custom when wives were usually obtained by theft or force. And unless the practice of getting wives by theft or force was so general where it prevailed that we may say it was almost invariable, it is incredible that such an association should be established in thepopular mind between marriage and the act of rapine, as would afterwards require the pretence of rapine to give validity to the ceremony of marriage. It must have been the system of certain tribes to capture women—necessarily the women of other tribes—for wives. But we may be sure that such a system co...« less