“The sex-instinct is one of the most deeply-seated expressions of the will; and it must not be restricted, either negatively by preventing its free function, or positively by insisting on its false function.”
Marriage as we have come to know it is often treated like an exchange of property. Vows typically consist of making idealistic promises designed to restrict and control love. This is not to say that everyone does it this way, but the exceptions are truly rare even in today’s much more sexually liberated culture. The Extremely popular romantic ideals of undying love, of servitude, of the need for approval from family, friends, “God,” “Goddess,” “the Universe,” whatever: all these are accursed bonds of slavery, not of love. If Procrustes didn’t have a honeymoon suite in his hostel, he should have; the whole world would make reservations.
“Seek not to control the will of any other in the matter of Love, setting Limits either to the Will to Love or the Will to seek Elsewhere the Goal of Will. For Love itself is the sole bond; all others set up strains against the Nature of Things: whereby cometh at last the ruin of all.”
The modern institution of marriage still owes much of its Tradition to its origins in the Roman Catholic Church, which reformed the earlier Pagan rites but did not cease in treating the woman as property. Even some Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church advocated virginity over marriage, because of the “governance of a husband and the chains of children” (the possibility of free and sexually active women never apparently entering their imaginations).
Crowley also criticized divorce in a place and time when women were still largely treated as property with nothing to fall back on:
“Marriage is a detestable institution, but the facilities for divorce (introduced ostensibly in the interests of the woman) have cut away the economic ground from under her feet.”
This of course underscores the need for women to have the ability to make their way in the world without a dependence on men. Much has been done to effect this change in the world in the last hundred years or so, but much more needs to be done.
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