Custom Of Stealing The Bride

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 174, 26 July 1939, Page 14

Custom Of Stealing The Bride

PRESUMABLY the variations on the theme of stealing a bride, which still exists among primitive peoples all ever the earth, depend as much on woman’s longing to admire the strength ana prowess of a man as upon the superstitious taboos concerning the ill-luck resultant upon shedding virgin blood. One has only to remember the popularity among civilised Western nations of the ridiculous sheikh legend propagated by the films to realise the appeal of savagery to women supposedly civilised.

Amongst a section of the Aneiza tribe in Arabia it is customary for the bride to fly from her groom mounted on the fastest trotting camel her people can

Courtship In Many Lands

provide. An English traveller happened to be staying with a chieftain (a sheikh) of Aneiza, when his youngest daughter was to marry a good-looking cousin whom she had known since she was a child, for the Beduin women are not veiled. The traveller remembered the trouble taken to test the paces of the camels, and the genuine fear of the girl lest she should be too easily caught. “Would you like to get away altogether?” the traveller asked. “No,” she replied with a laugh, and then, remembering the convention, she gasped out just before she mounted her tall whi% beast, “Yes, yes, of course I would—l must —” And she rode the most rickless course, endangering her own life and that of her pursuer. There was no pretence about her flight. At a headlong gallop—the most uncomfortable pace in the world —she forced her terrified mount over scrub and through ravines. When she was caught by even more reckless riding on the part of the man, the traveller thought she would use the knife in her girdle. She certainly appeared to be distraught with terror, and her bridegroom, ordinarily the most charming of young warriors, with long henna-dyed hair and circles of blue kohl under his eyes, might have been a hunting-beast. With no consideration for her shape or feelings, he dragged the girl across his saddle and bore her off to his tent, while the tribe—men and women separately feasted on sheep roasted whole, stuffed with rice, raisins, spices and young birds. Man the Master. In the most primitive forms of society, Man, the warrior, the hunter, the breadwinner, was the master in the widest sense of the word. As he was ignorant of the more complex forms of social intercourse, such as negotiating, selling, and buying, simply “going and getting” what he needed, it seems quite natural that his original way of taking a wife was just—taking, and if opposed, stealing her.

That evidently is one of the reasons for the existence in many parts of the world even to-day of customs which imply the “stealing of the bride”—no longer in the literal sense, even among the most primitive aborigines of Australia, who live in practically Stone Age conditions, but as a symbolic act of the marriage ritual which has to be observed. Most of the ethnologists who have investigated this custom are convinced, however, that there is another and even more powerful reason for the survival of this feature from the dark ages/of humanity. They contend that an inborn traditional fear of spells, of a “sex taboo” surrounding woman a fear springing from obscure and deep-lying human instincts—demands certain precautions. To disarm these supernatural powers, masculine valour and feminine bashfulness must b-' displayed. And, in comparing the farspread customs concerned, it has been found that it is not so much the girl or her parents who are supposed to put up a fight against her “captor” as the other women of the tribe. Realistic Ceremony. Ritualistic though the ceremony may be, it is frequently enacted with the utmost realism. The mimic assault, often enough, turns into a fight where bloody j heads, if not loss of life, bear witness | to the realistic methods of the performers. The custom is by no means confined I to the most remote and uncivilised

peoples. The east and south-east of Europe have preserved it as well as the steppes of Central Asia, the deserts of Arabia, large parts of Africa, South America and Australia. The civic marriage in its simplest and least ceremonial form now obtans throughout Russia, byt the Khirgiz and some tribes of Siberia still observe a ritual under which the wedding ceremony is performed in the absence of bride and groom, and the young wife remains for months afterwards with her parents preparing tent and furnishings to be “stolen” finally by her husband, while even in European Russia pretences at elopement and capture form part of the wedding ceremony. It is probable that the whole of tribal Africa originally knew no form of mating other than by capture. The strongest males took and kept as many young females as they could, and wedding ceremonies, if any, were of the simplest. Until quite recently certain Bushmen practised this form of wooing, at least to outward appearance, for as a matter of fact, an agreement between the two young people had preceded the capture, which was always most realistic. The parties met somewhere for a feast, for which as much meat as they could get hold of was brought by both sides. When all were busily gorging, the bridegroom would suddenly throw himself upon his chosen one, clinging to her the while her relatives did their level best, with sticks and fists, to defend her against his violence. If he was forced to let go. , the “ceremony,” i.e.. the procuring of food for a feast, had to be repeated jut a later date. Primitive Australia. This most primitive form of marriage is still in use among Australian tribes. Some of them make it a law that the man must drag his bride away by force, using all imaginable violence. This procedure, we are assured by scientists, is based on some semi-religious superstition which impels the husband to break the sex-resistance, and thereby the “taboo,” of his destined life-companion. I The Greenland Eskimos have a curious variation of the custom. There it is the old women of the tribe who have to act as “captors,” filling the coy young lady, who is hiding somewhere far from her parents’ igloo. and bringing her to that of the accepted suitor. This process is evidently more in the nature of an established custom, similar to the Zulu marriage, during which the bridesmaids surrounding the young belle have to put up a fight with sticks and clubs to facilitate her feigned escape from the “captor”— to whom she was w r edded just before in the presence of the whole tribe and w'ith great •'ejoicing. We may smile at some of these customs of far-away primitive peoples. The underlying superstitions and original reasons for their existence may long have been forgotten, but w r e should realj ise that, more than most religious cerei monies still piously observed, the “stealing of the bride” is founded on some deep-rooted antagonism of human nature: here Ls the eternal struggle between Man and Woman, preserved in its simplest form. Even in parts of Wales, not so , long ago. the bridegroom used to carry i his bride home from church across his 'saddle-bow, and some people d?im that the custom which survives here and there in Britain to-day. of the bride being carried across the threshold of her new home by her spouse, is a last vestige of a prehistoric compulsion.