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The Mystic Rose: a Study of Primitive Marriage
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1902 edition by Macmillan and Co., Ltd., London.
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1902
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April 6, 2024
The son of an Anglican clergyman, British intellectual Crawley (1867-1924) was a prep-school educated 1890 graduate of Cambridge Univ., with a bachelor's degree in classics. That led him to a first career as a schoolteacher, and he also followed in his father's footsteps by being ordained in the Church of England (despite his totally skeptical view of religion), but he resigned his last position as an educator in 1908, and relinquished his clerical status in 1913. Having a strong background in amateur athletics (his brother was on England's Olympic tennis team, and he was himself proficient enough in the sport to twice reach the quarterfinals at Wimbledon, besides being active in several other sports), he was able to enjoy a successful second career as a freelance sports journalist. But even during his teaching days, he was cultivating the role of an anthropologist, sociologist, and self-described “sexologist,” despite having no significant (if any) academic training in any of those fields. (That lack of training shows in his writing here, in places.)
I read this two-volume tome, which is the author's best-known work and which I'd picked up years before at a used book sale, early in 1992 (I can nail down the date accurately from a few notes I took at the time). It was part of a phase of interest on my part in reading up on primitive religion, which also led to my reading The New Golden Bough later that year. (Unfortunately, for that study, I mostly picked older sources which were well-known to laypersons like myself, rather than more recent ones that might have been more soundly researched!) Crawley's approach is very similar to Frazer's, though this book was originally published in 1902, well before the latter's magnum opus. (The edition I read is the one revised by Theodore Besterman in 1927, three years after Crawley's death, but his bibliography and bracketed updates don't change the original text.) Both men viewed religion as a purely man-made invention of primitive humans; and whereas “primitive,” in relation to the human past, simply means “original,” for these writers it also essentially meant densely ignorant, naively irrational and childish. They (and other adherents of that school) believed that the reasoning of such people could be accurately reconstructed by simply imagining ourselves to be similarly ignorant and childish, and then deducing how we/they would respond to universal experiences. (This is what E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in Theories of Primitive Religion, justly characterizes as the “if I were a horse” fallacy.) These deductions can then be “proven” empirically by collecting examples of a vast array of specific practices from (relatively) “primitive” cultures the world over, considering each one in “scissors-and-paste” fashion with no regard to its context, and ascribing to each one a motivation and interpretation consistent with the deductions. Reading about many of these practices, even if one is totally skeptical of Crawley's supposed “explanations,” is interesting in itself, and accounts for my rating the book as highly as I have. (Though on reflection, in all honesty I had to conclude that it doesn't deserve three stars.) But this kind of grab-bag approach to isolated features of cultural practice is no substitute for the actual empirical study of the whole range of inter-related beliefs and practices in any given culture, and it gets the methodological cart before the horse; the comprehensive study of cultures in their context is the proper basis of deduction, which has to follow the amassing of empirical data, not the other way around.
Crawley focused this particular book on explaining the supposed origins of marriage and ritual practices associated with it. Understanding and summarizing his theory is challenging, because he's not very adept at clearly stating it. (He was not, as Evans-Pritchard notes, “a very lucid writer,” and the latter, like some of Crawley's contemporaries, found this particular book “rather unintelligible.”) But to the best of my understanding, his hypothesis is that at the dawn of mankind (he was, of course, an evolutionist) physical contact between males and females was generally regarded as “taboo,” due to fear on the part of the males that they would acquire “female” characteristics, principally weakness and timidity, through sexual intercourse and especially by contact with women's blood in menstruation or the breaking of a hymen. (There is no evidence that prehistoric males all necessarily subscribed to sexist stereotypes about women, but there is pretty good evidence that Crawley did.) Marriage arose as an answer to this problem, by providing a ritual means of magically nullifying this danger for a particular male in relation to a particular woman (or women). As I noted at the time I read this, his case for this idea is “very weak” (or nonexistent). I have my own view of the origins of marriage and of wedding practices (and I believe the latter to be later than the former); and I base it on Genesis 2, which I consider a solider authority than Crawley's armchair speculations. So if I would recommend this book at all, it would be to readers who want to study primary sources on early 20th-century intellectual history, not to anyone wanting to actually study empirical data about marriage in primitive cultures.
I read this two-volume tome, which is the author's best-known work and which I'd picked up years before at a used book sale, early in 1992 (I can nail down the date accurately from a few notes I took at the time). It was part of a phase of interest on my part in reading up on primitive religion, which also led to my reading The New Golden Bough later that year. (Unfortunately, for that study, I mostly picked older sources which were well-known to laypersons like myself, rather than more recent ones that might have been more soundly researched!) Crawley's approach is very similar to Frazer's, though this book was originally published in 1902, well before the latter's magnum opus. (The edition I read is the one revised by Theodore Besterman in 1927, three years after Crawley's death, but his bibliography and bracketed updates don't change the original text.) Both men viewed religion as a purely man-made invention of primitive humans; and whereas “primitive,” in relation to the human past, simply means “original,” for these writers it also essentially meant densely ignorant, naively irrational and childish. They (and other adherents of that school) believed that the reasoning of such people could be accurately reconstructed by simply imagining ourselves to be similarly ignorant and childish, and then deducing how we/they would respond to universal experiences. (This is what E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in Theories of Primitive Religion, justly characterizes as the “if I were a horse” fallacy.) These deductions can then be “proven” empirically by collecting examples of a vast array of specific practices from (relatively) “primitive” cultures the world over, considering each one in “scissors-and-paste” fashion with no regard to its context, and ascribing to each one a motivation and interpretation consistent with the deductions. Reading about many of these practices, even if one is totally skeptical of Crawley's supposed “explanations,” is interesting in itself, and accounts for my rating the book as highly as I have. (Though on reflection, in all honesty I had to conclude that it doesn't deserve three stars.) But this kind of grab-bag approach to isolated features of cultural practice is no substitute for the actual empirical study of the whole range of inter-related beliefs and practices in any given culture, and it gets the methodological cart before the horse; the comprehensive study of cultures in their context is the proper basis of deduction, which has to follow the amassing of empirical data, not the other way around.
Crawley focused this particular book on explaining the supposed origins of marriage and ritual practices associated with it. Understanding and summarizing his theory is challenging, because he's not very adept at clearly stating it. (He was not, as Evans-Pritchard notes, “a very lucid writer,” and the latter, like some of Crawley's contemporaries, found this particular book “rather unintelligible.”) But to the best of my understanding, his hypothesis is that at the dawn of mankind (he was, of course, an evolutionist) physical contact between males and females was generally regarded as “taboo,” due to fear on the part of the males that they would acquire “female” characteristics, principally weakness and timidity, through sexual intercourse and especially by contact with women's blood in menstruation or the breaking of a hymen. (There is no evidence that prehistoric males all necessarily subscribed to sexist stereotypes about women, but there is pretty good evidence that Crawley did.) Marriage arose as an answer to this problem, by providing a ritual means of magically nullifying this danger for a particular male in relation to a particular woman (or women). As I noted at the time I read this, his case for this idea is “very weak” (or nonexistent). I have my own view of the origins of marriage and of wedding practices (and I believe the latter to be later than the former); and I base it on Genesis 2, which I consider a solider authority than Crawley's armchair speculations. So if I would recommend this book at all, it would be to readers who want to study primary sources on early 20th-century intellectual history, not to anyone wanting to actually study empirical data about marriage in primitive cultures.
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