Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/984

 918 chastity was more demanded by the father than by the suitor; a virgin was a commercial asset to the father—she brought a higher price. As chastity came more into demand, it was the practice to pay the father a bride fee in recognition of the service of properly rearing a chaste bride for the husband-to-be. When once started, this idea of female chastity took such hold on the races that it became the practice literally to cage up girls, actually to imprison them for years, in order to assure their virginity. And so the more recent standards and virginity tests automatically gave origin to the professional prostitute classes; they were the rejected brides, those women who were found by the grooms' mothers not to be virgins.

Very early the savage observed that race mixture improved the quality of the offspring. It was not that inbreeding was always bad, but that outbreeding was always comparatively better; therefore the mores tended to crystallize in restriction of sex relations among near relatives. It was recognized that outbreeding greatly increased the selective opportunity for evolutionary variation and advancement. The outbred individuals were more versatile and had greater ability to survive in a hostile world; the inbreeders, together with their mores, gradually disappeared. This was all a slow development; the savage did not consciously reason about such problems. But the later and advancing peoples did, and they also made the observation that general weakness sometimes resulted from excessive inbreeding.

While the inbreeding of good stock sometimes resulted in the upbuilding of strong tribes, the spectacular cases of the bad results of the inbreeding of hereditary defectives more forcibly impressed the mind of man, with the result that the advancing mores increasingly formulated taboos against all marriages among near relatives.

Religion has long been an effective barrier against outmarriage; many religious teachings have proscribed marriage outside the faith. Woman has usually favored the practice of in-marriage; man, outmarriage. Property has always influenced marriage, and sometimes, in an effort to conserve property within a clan, mores have arisen compelling women to choose husbands within their fathers' tribes. Rulings of this sort led to a great multiplication of cousin marriages. In-mating was also practiced in an effort to preserve craft secrets; skilled workmen sought to keep the knowledge of their craft within the family.

Superior groups, when isolated, always reverted to consanguineous mating. The Nodites for over one hundred and fifty thousand years were one of the great in-marriage groups. The later-day in-marriage mores were tremendously influenced by the traditions of the violet race, in which, at first, matings were, perforce, between brother and sister. And brother and sister marriages were common in early Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and throughout the lands once occupied by the Andites. The Egyptians long practiced brother and sister marriages in an effort to keep the royal blood pure, a custom which persisted even longer in Persia. Among the Mesopotamians, before the days of Abraham, cousin marriages were obligatory; cousins had prior marriage rights to cousins. Abraham himself married his half sister, but such unions were not allowed under the later mores of the Jews.