Note 96.2 — PSYCHE’S TASK

The Indians of Brazil. Among the Indians who inhabited the coast of Brazil near Rio de Janeiro about the middle of the sixteenth century, a married woman who gave birth to an illegitimate child was either killed or abandoned to the caprice of the young men who could not afford to keep a wife. Her child was buried alive; for they said that were he to grow up he would only serve to perpetuate his mother’s disgrace; he would not be allowed to go to war with the rest for fear of the misfortunes and disasters he might draw down upon them, and no one would eat any food, whether venison, fish, or what not, which the miserable outcast had touched.96.2 The natives of Ruanda. In Ruanda, a district of Central Africa, down to recent years any unmarried woman who was got with child used to be put to death with her baby, whether born or unborn. A spot at the mouth of the Akanyaru river was the place of execution, where the guilty women and their innocent offspring were hurled into the water. As usual, this Puritanical strictness of morality has been relaxed under European influence; illegitimate children are still killed, but their mothers escape with the fine of a cow.97.1 The Saxons. Among the Saxons down to the days of St. Boniface the adulteress or the maiden who had dishonoured her father’s house was compelled to hang herself, was burned, and her paramour hung over the blazing pile; or she was scourged or cut to pieces with knives by all the women of the village till she was dead.97.2 The Southern Slavs. Among the Slav peoples of the Balkan peninsula women convicted of immoral conduct used to be stoned to death. About the year 1770 a young betrothed couple were thus executed near Cattaro in Dalmatia, because the girl was found to be with child. The youth offered to marry her, and the priest begged that the sentence of death might be commuted to perpetual banishment; but the people declared that they would not have a bastard born among them; and the two fathers of the luckless couple threw the first stones at them. When Miss M. Edith Durham related this case to some Montenegrin peasantry, they all said that in the old days stoning was the proper punishment for unchaste women; the male paramours were shot by the relations of the girls whom they had seduced. When “that modern Messalina,” Queen Draga of Servia, was murdered, a decent peasant woman remarked that “she ought to be under the cursed stone heap” (pod prokletu gomilu). The country-folk of Montenegro, who heard the news of the murder from Miss Durham, “looked on it as a cleansing—a casting out of abominations—and genuinely believed that Europe would commend the deed, and that the removal of this sinful woman would bring prosperity to the land.”97.3 Even down to the second half of the nineteenth century in cases of seduction among the Southern Slavs the people proposed to stone both the culprits to death.98.1 This happened, for example, in Herzegovina in the year 1859, when a young man named Milutin seduced or (to be more exact) was seduced by three unmarried girls and got them all with child. The people sat in judgment upon the sinners, and, though an elder proposed to stone them all, the court passed a milder sentence. The young man was to marry one of the girls, to rear the infants of the other two as his legitimate children, and next time there was a fight with the Turks he was to prove his manhood by rushing unarmed upon the enemy and wresting their weapons from them, alive or dead. The sentence was fulfilled to the letter, though many years passed before the culprit could carry out the last part of it. However, his time came in 1875, when Herzegovina revolted against the Turks. Then Milutin ran unarmed upon a regiment of the enemy and found among the Turkish bayonets a hero’s death.98.2 Even now the Old Catholics among the South Slavs believe that a village in which a seducer is not compelled to marry his victim will be punished with hail and excessive rain. For this article of faith, however, they are ridiculed by their enlightened Catholic neighbours, who hold the far more probable view that thunder and lightning are caused by the village priest to revenge himself for unreasonable delays in the payment of his salary. A heavy hail-storm has been known to prove almost fatal to the local incumbent, who was beaten within an inch of his life by his enraged parishioners.98.3