Ancient washing machines didn't have the safety features that modern ones do, so it was much easier for people's step sisters to get stuck in them.
Ancient norse mafioso. Their hygiene is better than most, but so are their cement shoes. Can't stand 'em
:dennis: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Incest taboos aren't universal. And, well, modern western people vastly, vastly overstate the dangers of close relative inbreeding. Like there's basically no genetic risk to having kids with a first cousin unless both of you are carrying a gene for a genetic illness.
It just wasn't a big deal to some societies. In other societies, though, it was a really big deal, like with Oedipus. Depending on how inheritance works marrying fairly close relatives can be a strategy to keep property like land intact in the family instead of constantly subdividing it among descendants.
It just wasn’t a big deal to some societies. In other societies, though, it was a really big deal, like with Oedipus.
But Oedipus is from the same society as the mythology full of incest.
without doing a lot of research to come up with a more complete reply, I'll say that the individual Greek city states often had very different taboos and norms, and they changed a lot over time, and if I remember correctly (I haven't read Oedipus in a long time) the issue wasn't incest, specifically, but rather that he committed patricide and then cucked his dad or something? And however folks felt about incest I'm pretty sure Patricide was about as bad a crime as you could commit, up there with desecration of a sacred site, treason against your city, or murdering a guest.
But, again, I'm just going on old memories, so take this all with plenty of salt.
Incest taboos aren’t universal.
Actually they are. What precisely counts as incest varies, and there have always been people who violate it (like any taboo), but this is one of those things we can truly say exists in every documented human culture.
The real thing is that gods and supernatural beings were not generally considered moral paragons; they were usually more like powerful, capricious spirits. The shit they did was very often framed as fucked up. Alternatively, it was framed as not applicable to human morality, because they are so fundamentally different.
It was the PornHub front page of its day and society had yet to form a :volcel-police:
The ancient world was a much smaller world. You might only know the 50 people from your village your whole life and 1/3rd of that is children and the elderly. And, I mean, if your sisters bad with it and you don’t have God watching, who’s gonna know?
if your sisters bad with it and you don’t have God watching, who’s gonna know?
I'm gonna know dude. Is it not a universal thing to have some revulsion to incest?
To be serious and not joke, iirc there’s a psych phenomenon that describes sexual revulsion to people that you spent your formative years with as a mechanism of separating out relatives and potential partners even at the subconscious level. Weird stories of cousin fuckery and long lost sibling relationships abound because they didn’t actually grow up together despite the blood relation. And idk what brain folds effect the kink gene but god knows what’s going on with the people actually fetishizing incest for incest’s sake
It's called the Westermarck Effect and I'm pretty sure it's backed by evidence
surely not truly universal but definitely a majority of people are not into siblings.
but hey there's always cousins :shrug-outta-hecks:
Sorta kinda. There seems to be a mechanism where we're less likely to be attracted to people we grew up with, like in the same household with, but it's not 100%.
But there's no mechanism that makes you recognize that you're closely related to them on sight. It's mostly cultural taboos that keep people from marrying their siblings or first cousins. Marrying siblings is very rare afaik, but first cousin marriage has showed up all over the place, including European cultures until like the 19th century.
but it’s not 100%.
If it isn't 100% it's really, really close. Authentic attraction between family members who grew up together is basically unheard of. Every incestuous relationship that isn't entirely one-sided grooming is between estranged relatives.
It's very rare for the marriage pool of a group to be only fifty people. Even pretty isolated people would probably be in contact with thousands of other people over the course of the year if they were semi-nomadic, or at faires and other festivals and gatherings.
Probably not like... 50, but even in a small town of a couple of thousand people, you're going to be interacting with 1st, second, and third cousins pretty regularly. I have a friend from an old family in a small modern town of 15k, and she said that dating in highschool was actually kinda fraught because of this.
I think that level of incest is actually way more common than our modern sensibilities would suggest. It isn't siblings fucking or anything.
Genealogy is one of the roots of power for leaders who use mythological religions for their benefit. Keeping it "all in the family" is one way to keep a grip on power. This leads to inbred royals and stuff like the Hapsburg chin. Also, people do be horny and putting their fetishes in everything.
To elaborate, genealogies can be forged to show how the leaders are direct descendants of the gods. Having your leader also be a demigod is a good way to hold on to power.
And they don’t even establish that the nymph is his STEP sister
wym ancient societies didn't conform to our taboos
primogeniture is a selective pressure for incestuous practices :theory-gary:
jk its not always cast favorably, in those cases its an easy cautionary tale because its taboo. 'be careful where you stick your dick or its gonna end up in your mother/daughter/sister'. which is pretty absurd but a clear message of anti sexual aggression. just the other day on this very board some people were talking about piggish men & the messaging of 'how'd you like your sister/mother get catcalled' was used there; its the same stuff.
I think that in a "state of nature," incest is usually pretty harmless. Genetically, it generally takes multiple generations for effects to show up, and if it's happening organically it's unlikely to continue across generations. Historically it happened with the nobility, but only because it wasn't happening organically but because of political pressures, which remained consistent over time. Imo the historical example of the nobility is a big part of why it's so taboo, while for example Japan doesn't have the Hapsburgs or a similar example in their cultural memory and it's much less taboo there.
That's not to say, "incest is good, actually," I think very often it's bad because there's a lot of possibility for abuse or a power imbalance, and especially because of the taboo, it's very sus that two people would be down with it who just happen to be in the same family. But I think it's valid in some cases to chalk it up to cultural differences. If it's not as taboo, then it's more likely to occur organically in which case like I said I think it's pretty harmless.
That is my hot take about incest.
Worth noting - incest doesn't cause problems all by itself. The problem is that siblings and first cousins are more likely to both inherit a genetic abnormality or disorder, and then pass that on to their kids. If a genetic abnormality or disorder isn't present then there's no genetic problem to be passed down.
Also, I'll keep mentioning this, the taboo against first cousin marriage in European cultures is very recent. Like 150-200 years recent, and even that's not consistent.
Hard agree. The genetic problems are really not that bad.
Incest is bad because of the massive power imbalances within families and this is not a cultural thing at all. A parent/child relationship can never be really consensual because of the immense emotional dependency at all ages, and with young adults often financial dependency as well. Older siblings have immense influence on younger siblings as well.
Additionally, we are genetically hardcoded not to want to fuck people we grew up with. It's pretty impossible to feel actual romantic attraction to family members, including step-siblings because of this. If a dad abuses his daughter, it's not because of actual attraction, it's because he's getting off on the power.
The only exceptions to this are estranged family members who specifically didn't grow up together, those can and do occasionally develop feelings for each other. When you see an article about some 30-year-old dude being in love with his 50-something mom, it's usually that. There's still questions to be asked about these cases, but those are the only situations where it's arguably morally defensible imo.
The tendency to not be attracted to people you grew up with is an innate thing, but it's not absolute, relationships do sometimes develop between childhood friends, for example. And I don't feel confident saying that for example tribal societies, or even the large multi-generational households that were more the norm before the Industrial Revolution, always necessarily had the same power dynamics of modern day families, since the nuclear family is a relatively recent thing. But I do agree with you in the context of the modern day.
Sex with parents is a pretty strong and in so far as I am aware universal taboo. I'm sure there's an exception somewhere but I'm not aware of it. I imagine that when sex with your parents isn't presented as leading to immediate doom (Oedipus) it's likely to be due to some mythic significance or underlying plot or theme than a reflection of societal norms at the time.
But that does also assume fertility. As a species we have a generally poor level of fertility. So in any given environment most instances of incest even among fertile age persons would not result in inbreeding. Either through the baseline low level of fertility, or that not everyone can breed with their incest partner. So, the scary thing for us to consider is the possibility of there being evolutionary benefits for being gay with your dad and cumtown being right.
Off topic but wanted to post a historical incest factoid.
The medieval Catholic Church said that marrying anyone closer than your 6th cousin was incest, which was an issue for a huge majority of people since everyone lived in villages of like 100 people so everyone was at most 3rd cousins with everyone else. The way around it was to buy an indulgence or get the blessing of your parish priest.
The Church never changed it becuase it gave them a lot of power over people's lives, made people indebted to the church, and generated revenue by selling indulgences. This was also a common excuse for anulling marriages for lay people.
Looking at my notes from my lectures, they might actually have changed the law during the 4th Lateran council, shrinking the marriage limit from 7th cousin to 4th cousins removed.
Greek Myth is practically 65% proto-hentai. You mean everyone wore no clothes and fucking was the cause and answer to every problem? Hell, learning about Greek Mythology in 6th grade was deadass one of the first hints I might be bi.
I usually chalk it up to "Gods operate on a totally different biology than we do". Still weird to me though.
Look at Adam and Eve, whom the latter is a clone of the former. Adam should have just put his ego aside and stayed with Lilith as equal partners, at least then there is one instance where human intercourse is truly 100% incest-free.
Cain and their other kids though get up to some unspecified trouble though
Afaik Lilith is apocryphal in Christianity and in Judaism and is mostly relevant in some occult Jewish traditions. She's not part of the main stream religion or theology in either case.
I've never seen anything to indicate that ancient Hebrews were particularly concerned with the question of who ended up marrying Cain, Able, and their descendants. There are lots of putative genealogies out there, so you could look up some of the old ones, but I think the Genesis narrative just didn't consider the question of where the wives of the first generation came from to be important to the narrative.
“Gods operate on a totally different biology than we do”
It doesn't even have to be that different. They just have to have "perfect" genes, i.e. no genetic diseases.
Eh. For the Greeks at least the Gods were pretty weird. Athena was born fully armed and armored from Zeus's thigh. Aphrodite was born from sea-foam, I think, which might contextually have been Poseidon's spunk? I wouldn't make assumptions about what people believed about the biology of the gods without looking for ancient primary sources. They were believed to be sustained entirely by nectar and ambrosia, for instance.
Plus I'm not even clear if a concept akin to "genetic disease" existed. I'm pretty sure people were aware that certain traits were heritable, but I don't think there was anything like an awareness of genetics and lots of things were still believed to be the result of supernatural forces.
This is half-baked but I've seen Ancient greek gods described as "because they are not human, they are divine, they can have incest with no problems."
My half-baked idea is that these gods can do fantastic things like throw lightningbolts and cause earthquakes because they are divine creatures. The normal rules don't apply to them. This translates to... uh other normal rules. They don't apply to gods but they do apply to you because you can't throw lightning bolts.
Also have you considered that the Greek myths are simply factually the correct religion? And ancient humans just told the facts.
its true one time i met an old man wandering through a small forest path who claimed to be a son of zeus. He asked a task of me right then. A task he said that I would be rewarded for in luck and long life. I told him that though I would do him no harm for his lies, i doubted his claimed heritage. To prove himself to me that he was indeed of godly blood he did jack off on a rock, which sprang to life and danced about, very clearly pregnant with the seed of an Olympian. I then accepted his quest. But jeez that was an awkward few minutes waiting for him to finish.
Huh. Weirdest encounter I've ever had with an Olympian was that Bacchus got me to drink gin once at a party. Turns out I hate gin.
sometimes its hard to introduce a new character to the story, or one gets cut in the edit but you've still gotta have some people fuck :shrug-outta-hecks:
I think it was always just a thing. Our current aversion to people's attractive cousins is the historical outlier. On a materialist level it is just an efficient fantasy for the people around you to be into you.
