Note 661 — Chapter IV · RISE OF THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT

Westermarck, op. cit., 168-82, holds that tattooing is primarily a means of sexual attraction. The same is true of circumcision, 201-6; and of clothing, 186-212. The facts "appear to prove that the feeling of shame, far from being the original cause of man's covering his body, is, on the contrary, a result of this custom." When not due to climate, it "owes its origin, at least in a great many cases, to the desire of men and women to make themselves mutually attractive," 211. But see Hellwald, Die mensch. Familie, 60-96, who ascribes clothing, not to shame, but the love of ornament; and Finck, Primitive Love, 247 ff., who entirely rejects Westermarck's view, alleging, as a matter of fact, that tattooing "has had from the earliest recorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its use as a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably never occurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizing visitor." On circumcision see Kohler, in ZVR., XI, 429, 430; VI, 417-19, reviewing Wilken, De besnijdenis bij de volken van den Indischen Archipel (1885); Ploss, Das Kind, I, 342 ff., 367 ff.; Hellwald, op. cit., 362; Lippert, Kulturgeschichte, II, 317, who believes circumcision originated as a form of expiation. Crawley, Mystic Rose, 135 ff., regards tattooing, circumcision, and other mutilations, not as ornaments, but as "practically" amulets or charms to secure the safety of organs and functions.