The lives of savages are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of custom.  The simplest acts are ‘tabooed,’ a strict code regulates all intercourse.  Married life, especially, moves in the strangest fetters.  There will be nothing remarkable in the wide distribution of a myth turning on nuptial etiquette, if this law of nuptial etiquette proves to be also widely distributed.  That it is widely distributed we now propose to demonstrate by examples.

The custom of the African people of the kingdom of Futa is, or was, even stricter than the Vedic custom of women—­’wives never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their marriage.’ {72}

In his ‘Travels to Timbuctoo’ (i. 94), Caillie says that the bridegroom ‘is not allowed to see his intended during the day.’  He has a tabooed hut apart, and ‘if he is obliged to come out he covers his face.’  He ’remains with his wife only till daybreak’—­like Cupid—­and flees, like Cupid, before the light.  Among the Australians the chief deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, ’has a wife whose face he has never seen,’ probably in compliance with some primaeval etiquette or taboo. {73a}

Among the Yorubas ’conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.’ {73b} Of the Iroquois Lafitau says:  ’Ils n’osent aller dans les cabanes particulieres ou habitent leurs epouses que durant l’obscurite de la nuit.’ {73c} The Circassian women live on distant terms with their lords till they become mothers. {73d} Similar examples of reserve are reported to be customary among the Fijians.

In backward parts of Europe a strange custom forbids the bride to speak to her lord, as if in memory of a time when husband and wife were always of alien tribes, and, as among the Caribs, spoke different languages.

In the Bulgarian ‘Volkslied,’ the Sun marries Grozdanka, a mortal girl.  Her mother addresses her thus:—­

   Grozdanka, mother’s treasure mine,
   For nine long years I nourished thee,
   For nine months see thou do not speak
   To thy first love that marries thee.

M. Dozon, who has collected the Bulgarian songs, says that this custom of prolonged silence on the part of the bride is very common in Bulgaria, though it is beginning to yield to a sense of the ludicrous. {74a} In Sparta and in Crete, as is well known, the bridegroom was long the victim of a somewhat similar taboo, and was only permitted to seek the company of his wife secretly, and in the dark, like the Iroquois described by Lafitau.