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without the customary marriage dowry. If without the priestess could claim a portion of the patrimony at her father's death. If the father failed to stipulate, in providing the dowry, that the priestess was free to do with it what she willed, her brothers were entitled at the father's death to take from her the field and garden of which the dowry consisted, in exchange for wheat and oil and linen. 30
I shall not attempt at present to analyze the final stage in the development of the religious dedication of women. The subject would require an exhaustive study of the practice of religious female celibacy in Christianity. Let me point out tentatively, however, that the Christian nun may well be thought of as the descendant of the African wife-priestess and the Peruvian Sun- wife. In Christianity sacrifice passed over from the gift stage to the self-abnegation stage. 31 And this change in the general con- ception of sacrifice involved a change in the ideas of the meaning of religious female celibacy. In Christianity, too, the exclusive character of divine proprietorship was thought of rather as pre- cluding sexual intercourse with men than as leading to it with deity. Besides, the idea of a mystical union with deity took the place of ideas of sexual relations with deity. 32
I also refrain from a full discussion of certain practices which at first sight seem to be closely akin to the subject under con- sideration. I mean the practices of religious defloration and of conjugal abstinence at more or less sanctified periods. Mr. Crawley has pointed out, in developing his theory of sexual tabu, that both practices are due to the idea of danger from sexual intercourse. 33 Let me remark, incidentally, that religious deflora- tion is undoubtedly at times an act of phallicism, the adoration or
90 Loc. cit., pp. 151, 152.
n Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. II, pp. 359 ff.
- Mariology, the widespread mediaeval beliefs in the existence of incubi and
succubi, the endless incidents of sexual pathology in the lives of the saints, and the consecration of the nun with its simulated marriage rite of " taking the veil " as the "bride of Christ," show that the primitive attitude of mind was still held by many.
n The Mystic Rose, pp. 188, 189, 349. Durkheim thinks ("La prohibition de 1'inceste," L'annte sociologique. 1896-97, p. 55, n. i) that this very danger is due, in primitive thought, not, according to Mr. Crawley, to female weakness, but to
