Note 64.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Thus sexual irregularities are often supposed to endanger the whole community. Thus it appears that in the opinion of many peoples sexual irregularities, whether of the married or the unmarried, are not merely moral offences which affect only the few persons immediately concerned; they are believed to involve the whole people in danger and disaster either directly by a sort of magical influence or indirectly by rousing the wrath of gods to whom these acts are offensive. Nay they are often supposed to strike a blow at the very existence of the community by blighting the fruits of the earth and thereby cutting off the food supply. Wherever these superstitions prevail, it is obvious that public opinion and public justice will treat sexual offences with far greater severity than is meted out to them by peoples who, like most civilized nations, regard such misdemeanours as matters of private rather than of public concern, as sins rather than crimes, which may perhaps affect the eternal welfare of the individual sinner in a life hereafter, but which do not in any way imperil the temporal welfare of the innocent community as a whole. Hence the extreme rigour with which sexual crimes have been punished by many races. And conversely, wherever we find that incest, adultery, and fornication are treated by the community with extreme rigour, we may reasonably infer that the original motive for such treatment was superstition; in other words, that wherever a tribe or nation, not content with leaving these transgressions to be avenged by the injured parties, has itself punished them with exceptional severity, the reason for doing so has probably been a belief that the effect of all such delinquencies is to disturb the course of nature and thereby to endanger the whole people, who accordingly must protect themselves by effectually disarming and, if necessary, exterminating the delinquents. Ancient codes. This may explain, for example, why the Indian Laws of Manu decreed that an adulteress should be devoured by dogs in a public place, and that an adulterer should be roasted to death on a red-hot iron bed;64.1 why the Babylonian code of Hammurabi sentenced an adulterous couple to be strangled and cast into the river; and why the same code punished incest with a mother by burning both the culprits.64.2 On the same supposition we can understand the severity of the punishments meted out to certain sexual offences by the Mosaic law. Thus, for example, under it an adulteress and her paramour were sentenced to death:64.3 a woman who at marriage was found not to be a maid was stoned:64.4 the unchaste daughter of a priest was burned with fire;64.5 and if a man married a woman and her daughter, he and they were in like manner doomed to the flames.64.6