and habits differ from those of our grandparents, and no doubt the 21st century will have its own ideas. So if anyone tries to sell the idea of the sacred American way of life, with its cherished tribal fetishes, such as the one-family house on its own so called "private" lot (which of course is about the least private place on God's earth) and all the other peculiar tribal gods of ours tell him to go get his perspectives straight.

―

My favorite example is that of the Trobriand Islanders, off New Guinea. Among them, it is strictly taboo for boys and girls to eat together, before marriage. They can gorge themselves together once they've got their marriage licenses. No doubt one might observe boys and girls sneaking off into the woods to shave a surreptitious banana, thinking themselves no end of devils - but as for sleeping together that's all in the deal, and strictly a matter for private enterprise, in or out of wedlock. No doubt they would regard a Fred Harvey restaurant as a sink of shameless vice.

Of course, by and large one has to conform to the customs of one's own society in its own time and place. That needn't mean simply running with the herd and leaving out the chance of having some original thoughts of one's own. Actually, ours is an excessively conformist society, but lots of people have taken the nickey out of that. I take the "Ticky Facky Box" song - "and they all go to university, and come out just the same." How uncomfortably near the mark the author was!

Now in other times and places, religion and magic were a normal and essential recognition by man, that there are some things that not even the Rand Corporation can sort out. And in this field, works like those of Frazer and Crawley are strewn with snippets about men (and women) exchanging roles and/or clothes, as part of the ritual of life. Sometimes it was permanent, like the case of the Lydian priests who dressed as women for sacred reasons. Sometimes it was temporary, and denoted no loss of masculinity. Quote The Masai in East Africa and the Neorocean Jews, whose bridegrooms shared the bride's trousseau for a certain period after the wedding, as a sort of symbol of union. Nobody suggested that the bridegrooms were pansies. The same thing comes up in connection with fertility rites, ploughing the fields and so forth.

For my money the most interesting case in "The Mystic Rose"

30