Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ahhotep I, royal daughters were only allowed to marry their fathers. However, the same restrictions never bound the pharaohs themselves: They kept a supply of secondary queens at hand with whom to have children. New kings were usually mothered by nonroyal women, which sometimes made family lines quite complicated.
    Egyptian incest was not restricted to the society’s upper crust; the practice was adopted by the lower orders, and became common among people of all ranks. At the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, sisters typically married their full or half brothers or their fathers. In the cities, one-third of all young men with marriageable sisters married them, doing away with any need to find a bride from outside the family. (In Arsinoe, virtually every man with a living younger sister married her.) The Romans shared none of the Egyptians’ incestuous customs, and worked hard to suppress them—after about three centuries, they succeeded.
    In ancient Persia, marriage within immediate families was seen as a blessed thing. Under Zoroastrianism, which came into being sometime between the second millennium and sixth century BC, royal, priestly, and common families all practiced incest. Such unions were praised in legal and religious texts as “perfect” acts that brought great rewards in heaven and wiped away nearly all sins. Said one ancient source:
[B]lessed is he who has a child of his child . . . pleasure, sweetness and joy are owing to a son that begets from a daughter of his own, who is also a brother of that same mother, and he who is born of a son and a mother is also a brother of that same father; this is a much greater pleasure, which is a blessing of the joy . . . the family is more perfect; its nature is without vexation and gathering affection.
     
    For the Persians, a sexual union within a family was so sanctified that the fluids produced by an incestuous couple were thought to have curative powers. A passage from the Vendidad, a collection of Zoroastrian holy texts, advises corpse-bearers that they may purify themselves with the mingled urine of a closely related married couple. Conversely, any reluctance on a man’s part to marry his sister or mother was considered a grave sin deserving of “damnation in the highest degree,” even if he troubled to find his intended bride another husband. Women who refused to marry their relatives fared even worse: In one Zoroastrian text, a visitor to hell finds a woman condemned to suffer the pain of having a snake crawl in and out of her mouth for eternity. The visitor is told: “This is the soul of that wicked woman who violated next-of-kin marriage.”
    Like the Egyptians, the Persians used intrafamily marriages to hoard property, but that only partly explains why such unions—so rare in the ancient and modern worlds alike—were venerated. A full understanding requires a greater degree of probing into the religious practices of these societies than this book permits, but the key point is that there are in fact no “eternal” or “natural” sex laws. What is contrary to nature for one group can be a blessing for others. The Egyptians and Persians were not nomads or cave dwellers who had no choice but to reproduce within close family groups. Theirs were two of humanity’s longest-lasting civilizations. Lévi-Strauss was surely wrong, then, to claim that the ban against incest is culture itself. Like homosexuality, fellatio, and dozens of other sex acts that have been condemned as both unnatural and against God’s will, intrafamily sex was a matter of choice.
    Taboos against incest and sex during menstruation have evolved in nearly opposite directions. Bans against sexual contact with women during their periods persist in some religious contexts, but have been ignored by secular law. The Talmud requires flogging for such things, but no modern Western government has given the subject any attention. Incest, however, remains a “universal taboo” and is