together for some eight hours a day, laying aside all clothing, and singing the while.  The public are not admitted.  The dance, which is a kind of imitation of coitus, has been described by Zache ("Sitten und Gebraeuche der Suaheli,” Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 2-3, p. 72).  The more accomplished dancers excite general admiration.  During the latter part of this initiation various feats are imposed, to test the girl’s skill and self-control.  For instance, she must dance up to a fire and remove from the midst of the fire a vessel full of water to the brim, without spilling it.  At the end of three months the training is over, and the girl goes home in festival attire.  She is now eligible for marriage.  Similar customs are said to prevail in the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere.

The Hebrews had erotic dances, which were doubtless related to the art of love in marriage, and among the Greeks, and their disciples the Romans, the conception of love as an art which needs training, skill, and cultivation, was still extant.  That conception was crushed by Christianity which, although it sanctified the institution of matrimony, degraded that sexual love which is normally the content of marriage.

In 1176 the question was brought before a Court of Love by a baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with marriage.  “No,” said the baron, “I admire and respect the sweet intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love.  Love desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors.  Now husbands and wives boldly avow their relationship; they possess each other without contradiction and without reserve.  It cannot then be love that they experience.”  And after mature deliberation the ladies of the Court of Love adopted the baron’s conclusions (E. de la Bedolliere, Histoire des Moeurs des Francais, vol. iii, p. 334).  There was undoubtedly an element of truth in the baron’s arguments.  Yet it may well be doubted whether in any non-Christian country it would ever have been possible to obtain acceptance for the doctrine that love and marriage are incompatible.  This doctrine was, however, as Ribot points out in his Logique des Sentiments, inevitable, when, as among the medieval nobility, marriage was merely a political or domestic treaty and could not, therefore, be a method of moral elevation.

“Why is it,” asked Retif de la Bretonne, towards the end of the eighteenth century, “that girls who have no morals are more seductive and more loveable than honest women?  It is because, like the Greek courtesans to whom grace and voluptuousness were taught, they have studied the art of pleasing.  Among the foolish detractors of my Contemporaines, not one guessed the philosophic aim of nearly everyone of these tales, which is to suggest to honest women the ways of making themselves loved.  I should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those of the ancients....  To-day