However, beginning in the seventh century, members of the Indian Buddhist community began composing tantras that evoke the subject of incest. Both the seventh-century Sub-ahupariprccha Tantra and the eighth-century Manjusrimulakalpa contain descriptions of a yaksini-sadhana, a ritual for summoning a female spirit using a mantra. This was a ritual conducted for the sake of sexual gratification; the texts claim that the yaksini could assume the form desired by the adept, and serve his lust throughout the night. Both texts specify that the yaksini could particularly assume the form of one’s female relatives, such as one’s mother.
This is confirmed by the eighth-century commentator Buddhaguhya, who noted in his commentary on the Subahupariprccha that this rite is intended for men who desire to enjoy another woman without incurring the faults of incest. Some Indian Buddhists appear to have seen sex with a summoned spirit as a way around the third precept. The yaksini could assume any form that one desires, but since she is not truly one’s mother, this is not actually incest. However, this was not a rite to be engaged in lightly; readers are warned that if they do not restrain their passions, the yaksini could devour them.
The rhetoric of sex with family members also appears in many later tantras such as the Guhyasamaja and Cakrasamvara Tantras. In its fifth chapter, the Guhyasamaja Tantra states that the adept who has sex with his mother, sister, or daughter can attain great success. In its thirty-third chapter, the Cakrasamvara Tantra describes sexual yogic practices to be undertaken with a consort and promises that if readers undertake these, even with female relatives, they will be liberated.
In evaluating passages such as these, it is important to note that transgressive rhetoric is common in tantric literature, and its interpretation is problematic; one cannot assume that these passages accurately reflect the behavior of actual Buddhists. One of the purposes of this rhetoric might be to shock the reader and simultaneously aggrandize the text and the practices it describes by promising salvation even to the gravest of sinners. Moreover, tantric exegetes typically provide alternate interpretations for transgressive passages. Commentators on the Cakrasamvara Tantra understand the “mother” here to be the consort of the “transgressor’s” guru, the “sister” to be one of the guru’s female disciples, and the “daughter” to be one of his own female disciples. It thus describes an alternate social order using familial kinship terminology. Sex within this context would only be incest in this metaphorical sense, and would not necessarily be a transgression of the third precept.
Incest in Christianity
In the Hebrew Bible, the first text to condemn incestuous relations is found in the topic of Leviticus. In chapter 18, the audience is admonished not to keep the loose morals of the Canaanites, who once occupied the Holy Land, but to live by the new Mosaic Code that God had established for them. The verses that followed established the boundaries of the sort of incestuous conduct God had forbidden: addressing a male readership, the text admonished readers not to have sexual relations with their mothers because this would bring great dishonor onto their fathers; similarly, they should refrain from intercourse with their sisters and with other daughters born of their mother—the text refers to half-sisters who share the same mother but not the same father. Sexual intimacy with aunts and uncles was also forbidden and extended to several degrees of affinity, including step-parents and close in-laws.
The Jewish law of incest was established for a nomadic community in the process of settling down to a more fixed way of life. The Roman law of the classical and postclassical period, which was intended to govern the conduct of families that formed a trans-Mediterranean elite in the height of empire, also made valuable contributions to the development of incest regulations. Roman law classed as capital offenses all sexual relations between parents and their offspring and between siblings, aunts, uncles, nephews, or nieces. Roman law, which made large allowances for adoption, also prohibited sexual relations between adopted children and their new parents.
In western Europe, the early Middle Ages witnessed not only the collapse of Roman political authority, identified by many with the year 476 CE, but also the rise of Christianity as a religion capable of influencing the shape of public life—a role not only sought by some Christian leaders but also thrust upon them as representatives of the largest and strongest institution in a world otherwise characterized by chaos.
One of the earliest manifestations of this new Christian predominance in society was the moral code expressed in the penitential manuals. The earliest penitential manuals are dateable to the seventh century, but these documents grew in number and sophistication in succeeding centuries. The first manuals were the product of Irish monks who needed to develop uniform principles for the imposition of penance following auricular confession. These documents proved popular and could soon be found in many parts of the European Continent. The seventh-century Canons of Theodore provided an important source for the development of an ethic against incest. This text proposed that incest involved not only heterosexual relations within the forbidden degree—parents, siblings, ascendants and descendants, aunts and uncles—but also classified homosexual relations between close relatives as a form of incest. The Bigotian Penitential subsequently reproduced these rules in a more compressed form, condemning as guilty of illicit fornication not only those who sleep heterosexually with a mother or a sister but also “a brother … with his natural brother.”
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the emergence of a more settled and politically stable life in Europe that allowed, in turn, for the development of a sophisticated body of law for the governance of the Church. The canonists of the high and later middle ages—roughly the twelfth through fifteenth centuries—were responsible for the radical expansion of incest categories under the rubrics of the marital impediments of consanguinity and affinity. Consanguinity was defined broadly, to prohibit sexual relations extending as remotely as the seventh degree of relationship. Affinity was based on a strong concept of the spiritual relationship that was created through the sacraments of baptism and marriage. Baptismal sponsors, for instance, were considered “co-parents” with the natural parents, and their issue and blood relations were concomitantly forbidden from marrying the offspring whom they sponsored in baptism. The fact that the Church claimed for itself the power to dispense from these marital impediments, at least in their remoter degrees, was considered by many critics to reflect a larger pattern of abuse —the creation of unworkable rules that required the regular discretionary intervention of church officials to remedy.
The Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, who were among the steadiest critics of the Catholic Church’s system of consanguinity and affinity, tended to revert the definition of incest to Levitical models. A statute of Henry VIII that defined incest along Levit-ical lines had perhaps the greatest influence when its general language and definitions were adopted by a series of American courts and legislatures in the years following the American Revolution. Some courts confidently identified this statute as reflective of “the law of God,” although other courts were content to see in it a reflection of the common sense of the common law. The main outlines of this statute remain the foundation of the American law of incest, although the public rationale for incest prohibitions has ceased to be a divine commandment and has instead become the desire to eradicate sexual competition from the household or to prevent the birth of genetically defective offspring.
Incest in Hinduism
As with many other ancient religious cultures, a diverse representation can be traced in Hindu cultural texts to account for the existence of incestuous practices in early Indian society. Although the act of incest as the primeval act of Creation itself is acknowledged in at least one mythic narrative in Hinduism, the deleterious effects of incestuous practices are elsewhere abundantly reiterated—especially in strictures of normative marriage arrangements, both en-dogamous and exogamous.
One well known story from Vedic literature explains that the divinity responsible for creation (Prajapati or Brahma) seduces his own daughter, the Dawn (Ushas), to set in motion the process of populating the earth, (Rig Veda 1:164). Another suggestion of a possible incestuous relationship between brother and sister —ultimately aborted—is found in the Vedic narrative of Yama and Yama (Rig Veda 10:10), wherein the brother Yama rejects his sister Yama’s argument that they must relate sexually for procreative purposes. It is unclear if this story instantiates for the Vedic peoples the widely established prohibition on incest found in other cultures or if it merely functions as a speculation on a potential cosmogony. According to a Puranic creation narrative, Manu, the son of Brahma, who was himself produced incestuously, marries his sister, the goddess Shatarupa to propagate humanity.
Several other incestuous pairings exist in the classical and folk literature of Hinduism, often involving Shiva or those associated with Shiva, where the necessity for creation and the establishment of prohibition often operate in the same narrative space. Besides incestuous acts being linked with creation scenarios, there are suggestions from the vast literature on morality (dharmashastra) that one of the four deadly sins of orthodox Hinduism— namely, relating sexually with a teacher’s wife (gurutalpa)—can be considered an incestuous act, for obvious reasons. In expiation for such an act, the perpetrator is advised to spend a year wearing bark garments and performing austerities in a remote forest.
Another possible site of reference for the practice of incest in premodern Hindu India lies within the larger phenomenon of niyoga, or levirate unions. Here, sexual relations between the wife and the brother of her husband —the younger brother generally—qualifies by some standards as an incestuous union. The practice of niyoga was usually invoked and justified to continue the family line in cases where procreation within a normative husband-wife relationship faced an insurmountable obstacle. There are tantric texts within the broader fold of Hinduism that, similarly to Buddhist tantras, speak of incest in the context of ritual practices. The rhetorical invocation of these practices can be viewed as a mode of liberating the spiritual adept from the anxieties associated with incestuous fantasies. Although sociologists and anthropologists have compiled an extensive literature documenting the realities of incest in contemporary Indian society, explicit information from specifically “religious” texts is scant at best.
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