Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

TOBIAS AND SARA—JUS PRIMM NOCTIS 433wearing of and the fumigation with the glands of a fish, toensure that " the demons will flee from him."The jealous passion of demons or devils for maidens coloursAsian, African, and European folk-lores. They lie in wait formarried couples ; sternly guard their so-called brides. 1 Otherwisethey were usually innocuous. Tobias argues with theangel, " If I go in unto her, I die as the others before : for awicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth nobody, but those thatcome in unto her " (vi. 14).According to the Testament of Solomon, Asmodeus (thedemon) avows, " my business is to plot against the newlywedded, so that they may not know one another. I sever themby many calamities, and I waste away the beauty of virginwomen." In Asmodeus we recognise a male counterpart ofLilith and her dangerous relations with men. The demon, infact, regards the virgin as his own, himself as her true andconstant lover, and resents, prevents, or " avenges any infringementof his yws primcB ttoctis." 2The misconception, evident in the last eight words of thislearned writer, as to what constituted the jus primce nodisprevails widely. As they^s is the child, strange as the parentagemay appear, of the tale of Tobias and Sara, it seems worth ourwhile to notice the strangely erroneous views held both as to thepossessor of the jus and the occasion of its exercise, and shortlyto explain, even at the risk of seeming to stray from fishinginto folklore, the origin and the estabUshment of the custom.According to popular belief the superior or lord of the fee,among other feudal privileges, possessed, as such, the vested rightof connection with the daughters of his tenantry or of holders ofland under him on the first night of their marriages. Somewriters on the French Revolution, indeed, indignantly classthe wide and brutal exercise of this right on chaste maidens bylicentious seigneurs as not the least, perhaps one of the mostprovocative, of the social causes, which led to the detestation andsubsequent massacre of the noblesse in many departements andto the overthrow of the old landed system !^J.G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), 520 ff.* R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 74-75.