ABSTRACT
This book is meant to be a kind of apology for a serious omission of which I was guilty when I wrote my History of Human Marriage, over twenty years ago. In that book I devoted only a very short chapter to the wedding ceremonies, and in my brief treatment of them I almost entirely failed to recognise their magical significance. This was afterwards strongly emphasised by Mr. Ernest Crawley in his theory that the ceremonies of marriage are intended to neutralise the dangers supposed to be connected with all contact between man and woman and with the state of marriage itself, as also to make the union safe, prosperous, and happy—a theory which, as he himself acknowledged in the Preface to The Mystic Rose, was founded on Dr. Frazer’s discovery of the primitive conception of danger attaching to the sexual act. For my own part I shall not here make an attempt to lay down any general theory as to the origin of marriage ceremonies, but shall restrict myself to the wedding customs of a single people, namely, the Muhammedan natives of Morocco, among whom I have spent some six years engaged in sociological research.
