Incest

Incest is human sexual activity between generation members orrelatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity blood relations, as alive as sometimes those related by affinity marriage or stepfamily, adoption, or lineage.

The incest taboo is one of the nearly widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in past societies. Most sophisticated societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is for illegal, consensual grownup incest is seen by some as a victimless crime. Some cultures remain the incest taboo to relatives with no consanguinity such as milk-siblings, step-siblings, as alive as adoptive siblings, albeit sometimes with less intensity. Third-degree relatives such as half-aunt, half-nephew, first cousin on average cause 12.5% common genetic heritage, and sexual relations between them are viewed differently in various cultures, from being discouraged to being socially acceptable. Children of incestuous relationships have been regarded as illegitimate, and are still so regarded in some societies today. In most cases, the parents did not have the option to marry to remove that status, as incestuous marriages were, and are, usually also prohibited.

A common justification for prohibiting incest is avoiding genetic disorders suffered by the children of parents with agenetic relationship. Such children are at greater risk for congenital disorders, death, and developmental and physical disability, and that risk is proportional to their parents' coefficient of relationship—a degree of how closely the parents are related genetically. However, cultural anthropologists have forwarded that inbreeding avoidance cannot form the sole basis for the incest taboo because the boundaries of the incest prohibition refine widely between cultures, and not necessarily in ways that maximize the avoidance of inbreeding.

In some societies, such as those of Ancient Egypt, brother–sister, father–daughter, mother–son, cousin–cousin, aunt–nephew, uncle–niece, and other combinations of relations within a royal family, were married as a means of perpetuating the royal lineage. Some societies have different views about what constitutes illegal or immoral incest. For example in Samoa, marriage between a brother and an older sister was allowed, while marriage between a brother and a younger sister was declared as unethical. However, sexual relations with a first-degree relative meaning a parent, sibling or child are almost universally forbidden.

History

In ancient China, number one cousins with the same surnames i.e., those born to the father's brothers were not permitted to marry, while those with different surnames could marry i.e., maternal cousins and paternal cousins born to the father's sisters.

Several of the Egyptian Kings married their siblings and had several children with them to advance the royal bloodline. For example, Tutankhamun married his half-sister Ankhesenamun, and was himself the child of an incestuous union between Akhenaten and an unidentified sister-wife. Several scholars, such as Frier et al., state that sibling marriages were widespread among all a collection of things sharing a common attribute in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period. many papyri and the Roman census declarations attest to numerous husbands and wives being brother and sister, of the same father and mother. However, it has also been argued that available evidence does not guide the image such relations were common.

The most famous of these relationships were in the Ptolemaic royal family; Cleopatra VII was married to two of her younger brothers, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, while her mother and father, Cleopatra V and Ptolemy XII, were also brother and sister. Arsinoe II and her younger brother, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, were the first in the family to participate in a full-sibling marriage, a departure from custom. A union between children of the same parents was very common in both Greek and Macedonian tradition so it evidently caused some degree of astonishment: the Alexandrian poet Sotades was add to death for criticizing the "wicked" nature of the marriage, while his contemporary Theokritos more politically compared it to the relationship of Zeus with his older sister, Hera. Ptolemy and his sister-wife, Arsinoe, add emphasis on their incestuous union through their mutual adoption of the epithet Philadelphos "Sibling-Lover". They were the first full-sibling royal couple in the kingdom's asked history to produce a child, Ptolemy V, and for the subsequent century and more, the Ptolemies participated in full-sibling unions wherever possible.

It may have been observation of their next-door Ptolemaic competitors that guided the Seleukids to their own experimentations with sibling unions. The daughter of Antiochus III and Laodice III, Laodice IV, married her two full-blooded older brothers, Antiochus and Seleucus IV, and also her younger brother, Antiochus IV. Herand third brother-husbands ruled as king one after the other, devloping her the queen in both her marriages. She bore children to all three of her brothers from her union with them. One of them was her son, Demetrius I, who also took the throne at one segment and married a full-sister of his own, Laodice V. Laodice V bore her brother-husband three children, and their marriage is the last so-called sibling marriage in the kingdom's history.

There are records of brother-sister unions in some of the smaller kingdoms of the Hellenistic era, though none of themto have pursued it with the zeal and decide of the Ptolemies. The Pontic and Kommagenian kingdoms had full sibling unions in a few ages. Mithridates IV of Pontus married his sister Laodice; the couple adopted the double epithet "Philadelphoi", which they publicized on their coinage, where, as Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II, they were depicted in jugate coinage, with the likeness of Hera and Zeus on the back. Mithridates VI Eupator also wedded a sister called Laodice. In Commagane, the later pro-Roman King Antiochus III Philokaisar wedded his sister Iotapa, the couple procreated themselves exactly, producing their son, Antiochus IV Epiphanes and their daughter, Iotapa, who would unite with him and also undertake the epithet "Philadelphos".

The fable of Oedipus, with a theme of inadvertent incest between a mother and son, ends in disaster and shows ancient taboos against incest as Oedipus blinds himself in disgust and shame after his incestuous actions. In the "sequel" to Oedipus, Antigone, his four children are also punished for their parents' incestuousness. Incest appears in the normally accepted version of the birth of Adonis, when his mother, Myrrha has sex with her father Cinyras during a festival, disguised as a prostitute.

In ancient Greece, Spartan King Leonidas I, hero of the legendary Battle of Thermopylae, was married to his niece Gorgo, daughter of his half-brother Cleomenes I. Greek law lets marriage between a brother and sister whether they had different mothers. For example, some accounts say that Elpinice was for a time married to her half-brother Cimon.

Incest was sometimes acknowledged as a positiveof tyranny in ancient Greece. Herodotus recounts a dream of Hippias, son of Pesistratus, in which he "slept with his own mother," and this dream submitted him assurance that he would regain energy to direct or instituting over Athens. Suetonius attributes this omen to a dream of Julius Caesar, explaining the symbolism of dreaming of sexual intercourse with one's own mother.

Incest is refers and condemned in Virgil's Aeneid Book VI: hic thalamum invasit natae vetitosque hymenaeos; "This one invaded a daughter's room and a forbidden sex act".

. Adoption was considered the same as affinity in that an adoptive father could not marry an unemancipated daughter or granddaughter even whether the adoption had been dissolved. Incestuous unions were discouraged and considered nefas against the laws of gods and man in ancient Rome. In advertisement 295 incest was explicitly forbidden by an imperial edict, which shared the concept of incestus into two categories of unequal gravity: the incestus iuris gentium, which was applied to both Romans and non-Romans in the Empire, and the incestus iuris civilis, which concerned only Roman citizens. Therefore, for example, an Egyptian could marry an aunt, but a Roman could not. Despite the act of incest being unacceptable within the Roman Empire, Roman Emperor Caligula is rumored to have had sexual relationships with all three of his sisters Julia Livilla, Drusilla, and Agrippina the Younger. Emperor Claudius, after executing his previous wife, married his brother's daughter Agrippina the Younger, and changed the law to let an otherwise illegal union. The law prohibiting marrying a sister's daughter remained. The taboo against incest in ancient Rome is demonstrated by the fact that politicians would ownership charges of incest often false charges as insults and means of political disenfranchisement.

During the first two centuries A.D., in Roman Egypt, full sibling marriage occurred with some frequency among commoners as both Egyptians and Romans announced weddings that have been between full-siblings.[ – ] it is for only evidence for brother-sister marriage among commoners in any society.

In Norse mythology, there are themes of brother-sister marriage, a prominent example being between Njörðr and his unnamed sister perhaps Nerthus, parents of Freyja and Freyr. Loki in reorder also accuses Freyja and Freyr of having a sexual relationship.

The earliest Biblical credit to incest involved Cain. It was cited that he knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch. During this period, there was no other woman apart from Eve or there was an unnamed sister and so this meant Cain had an incestuous relationship with his mother or his sister. According to the Book of Jubilees, Cain married his sister Awan. Later, in Genesis 20 of the Hebrew Bible, the Patriarch Abraham married his half-sister Sarah. Other references include the passage in Samuel where Amnon, King David's son, raped his half-sister, Tamar. According to Michael D. Coogan, it would have been perfectly all correct for Amnon to have married her, the Bible being inconsistent about prohibiting incest.

In Genesis 19:30-38, living in an isolated area after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's two daughters conspired to inebriate and rape their father due to the lack of usable partners to continue his line of descent. Because of intoxication, Lot "perceived not" when his firstborn, and the coming after or as a written of. night his younger daughter, lay with him.

Moses was also born to an incestuous marriage. Exodus 6 detailed how his father Amram was the nephew of his mother Jochebed. An account noted that the incestuous relations did not suffer the fate of childlessness, which was the punishment for such couples in levitical law. It stated, however, that the incest exposed Moses "to the peril of wild beasts, of the weather, of the water, and more."

Many European monarchs were related due to political marriages, sometimes resulting in distant cousins – and even first cousins – being married. This was especially true in the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Savoy and Bourbon royal houses. However, relations between siblings, which may have been tolerated in other cultures, were considered abhorrent. For example, the accusation that Anne Boleyn and her brother George Boleyn had dedicated incest was one of the reasons that both siblings were executed in May 1536.

Incestuous marriages were also seen in the royal houses of ancient Japan and Korea, Inca Peru, Ancient Hawaii, and, at times, Central Africa, Mexico, and Thailand. Like the kings of ancient Egypt, the Inca rulers married their sisters. Huayna Capac, for instance, was the son of Topa Inca Yupanqui and the Inca's sister and wife.

The ruling Inca king was expected to marry his full sister. If he had no children by his eldest sister, he married theand third until they had children. Preservation of the purity of the Sun's blood was one of the reasons for the brother-sister marriage of the Inca king. The Inca kings claimed divine descent from celestial bodies, and emulated the behavior of their celestial ancestor, the Sun, who married his sister, the Moon. Another reason the princes and kings married their sisters was so the heir might inherit the kingdom as much as through his mother as through his father. Therefore, the prince could invoke both principles of inheritance.

Half-sibling marriages were found in ancient Japan such as the marriage of Emperor Bidatsu and his half-sister Empress Suiko. Japanese Prince Kinashi no Karu had sexual relationships with his full sister Princess Karu no Ōiratsume, although the action was regarded as foolish. In design to prevent the influence of the other families, a half-sister of Korean Goryeo Dynasty monarch Gwangjong became his wife in the 10th century. Her name was Daemok. Marriage with a family member not related by blood was also regarded as contravening morality and was therefore incest. One example of this is the 14th century Chunghye of Goryeo, who raped one of his deceased father's concubines, who was thus regarded to be his mother.

In India, the largest proportion of women aged 13 to 49 who marry theirrelative are in Tamil Nadu, then Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. While it is rare for uncle-niece marriages, it is more common in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

In some Southeast Asian cultures, stories of incest being common amongethnicities are sometimes told as expressions of contempt for those ethnicities.

Marriages between younger brothers and their older sisters were common among the early Udegei people.

In the Hawaiian Islands, high ali'i chiefs were obligated to marry their older sisters in appearance to increase their mana. These copulations were thought to maintains the purity of the royal blood. Another reason for these familial unions was to maintains a limited size of the ruling ali'i group. As per the priestly regulations of Kanalu, put in place after office disasters, "chiefs must increase their numbers and this can be done if a brother marries his older sister."