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Updated: June 11, 2025
The doctrine of the Church has always been one wife, one husband. Polygamy and polyandry are relatively sterile.
'Illiterate men, ignorant of the writings of each other, bring the same reports from various quarters of the globe, wrote Millar of Glasgow. When sailors, merchants, missionaries, describe, as matters unprecedented and unheard of, such institutions as polyandry, totemism, and so forth, the evidence is so strong, because the witnesses are so astonished.
This institution is, by the way, not the outcome of Buddha's doctrines. Polyandry existed long before the advent of Buddha.
Curiously enough too, marriages are renewed frequently more than that, I should say, generally for life-long periods. Polygamy with the consent of all parties is permitted, but seldom practiced. Polyandry is unlawful, and but few cases of it ever appear. "You may think all this a curious system, gentlemen, but it works." "That's the answer," muttered the Very Young Man.
M'Lennan, Mr., on infanticide; on the origin of the belief in spiritual agencies; on the prevalence of licentiousness among savages; on the primitive barbarism of civilised nations; on traces of the custom of the forcible capture of wives; on polyandry. Macnamara, Mr., susceptibility of Andaman islanders and Nepalese to change.
There is, of course, a marvellous virtue in the word ‘legalised.’ The most unholy and horrible marriages between fair young girls and rich or titled dotards, drunkards, or cretins are considered perfectly proper and respectable because ‘legalised.’ Yet the people who countenance these abominations would probably be unutterably shocked by the very whisper of polyandry an infinitely more decent relation, because regulated by honest sex attraction, and free presumably from mercenary considerations.
Under such circumstances it is conceivably difficult for one man to support and protect a family. At any rate, the form of polyandry which we find in Tibet suggests that such economic conditions may have been the main cause of its existence. Ordinarily in Tibet a polyandrous family is formed by an older brother taking a wife, and then admitting his younger brothers into partnership with him.
Thus in Tibet the upper classes practice polygyny and monogamy, while among the lower classes we find polyandry and monogamy. In all these regions where polyandry occurs, moreover, it is to be noted that the conditions of life are harsh and severe. Tibet is an exceptionally inhospitable region, with a climate of arctic rigor, the people living mainly by grazing.
Principally this, that the "Jukes" formed a little society of their own in which marriage and co-habitation was the rule. Of their women 52 per cent. were disreputable; but Dugdale refuses to call them prostitutes, but rather harlots, indicating that their marital relations were of the order of a progressive polyandry and by no means unproductive.
This was but the outward numerical fact of social dislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moral degradation.
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