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Incest   /ˈɪnsˌɛst/   Listen
Incest

noun
1.
Sexual intercourse between persons too closely related to marry (as between a parent and a child).



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"Incest" Quotes from Famous Books



... either. He may not marry his daughter, stepdaughter, or adopted daughter. He may not marry his sister, or his brother's widow, or a first cousin by blood or adoption. Sexual intercourse between persons in the above relations is considered incest, and does not often occur. The line of kin does not appear to be traced as far as second cousin, and between such there are ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... conceptions in those inflexible shapes which have sometimes been adopted by the more dogmatic psychoanalysts who have followed him. Nor need we be unduly shocked by the "incestuous" air of the "Oedipus Complex,"[226] as it is commonly called, which figures as a component of the process. The word "incest," though it has been used by Freud himself, seems scarcely a proper word to apply to the vague and elementary feelings of children, especially when those feelings scarcely pass beyond a stage of non-localized and therefore really ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... his diary made during the month of October, 1789, long before 'the Terror,' by Gouverneur Morris. 'Surely it is not the usual order of Divine Providence to leave such abominations unpunished. Paris is, perhaps, as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine, oppression, baseness, cruelty, and yet this is the city which has stepped forward in the sacred cause ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... girl of 9 1/2 years, following her complaint of local symptoms, which proved to be due to vulvitis, accused her father and brother of incest. She was a bright child and normally affectionate, even towards these relatives. Her father and brother were held in jail for several weeks, but were dismissed at the trial because of the ascertained untruth ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... evidently known to their unhappy authors. Next upon Burnet, down comes Mr. Froude. Burnet had shaped his criticism thus: 'If,' he says, 'the queen was not married to the king, there was no adultery.' Certainly not. But, says Mr. Froude, Burnet forgets that she was condemned for conspiracy and incest, as well as for adultery. Then thirdly come we, and reverting to this charge of forgetfulness upon Burnet, we say, Forgets! but how was he bound to remember? The conspiracy, the incest, the adultery, all ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... still suspicious, where lassitude denies such couples the filial caresses whose apparent youthfulness seems new, and the maternal candors whose gentleness and comfort impart, in a sense, the engaging remorse of a vague incest. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... he consistently snubbed, and which took revenge on him by writing his life. And, to crown all, even Catiline, abuser of our patience, seducer of vestal nuns, and drinker of children's blood,—whose very name suggests murder, incest, and robbery,—even Catiline has found an able defender in Professor Beesly. It is claimed that Catiline was a man of great abilities and average good character, a well-calumniated leader of the Marian party which Caesar afterwards led to victory, and that his famous plot ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... thorough-going partisan. I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... undoubtedly indulge in abnormal ones. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that the Puritans had an itching for the details of the morbid and the sensational. The nature of revelations seldom, if ever, grew too repulsive for their hearing, and if the case were one of adultery or incest, it was sure to be well aired. There was a possibility that if an offender made a thorough-going confession before the entire congregation or community, he might escape punishment, and on such occasions it would seem that the congregation sat listening closely and drinking in all the hideous ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... a noble manner, or entirely good. Although crime may have a certain grandeur of its own, or at least a mixture of more generous motives, they do not attain to this. Gianpaolo, careless though he was about incest and parricide, could not, or dared not, on a just occasion, achieve an exploit for which the whole world would have admired his spirit, and by which he would have won immortal glory: for he would have been the first to show how little prelates, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... near the Nanga, assured me that the visit of the women to the Nanga resulted in temporary promiscuity; all tabus were defied, and relations who could not speak to one another by customary law committed incest" ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... shape of a thing they name a cross, said to be blest and sanctified by the polluted words & hands of a wretched priest, a spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a monster of nature & a servant to the Devil, who for a real will pretend to absolve his followers from perjury, incest, or parricide, and canonize them for cruelties committed upon we heretics, as they style us, and even rank them in the number of those cursed saints who by their barbarity have rendered their names immortal & odious to all true believers. By devils ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... Of these there have been few translations[97] For Gallic or Italian nations; And one or two perhaps in German— But in this last I can't determine. But then I only sung of passions That do not suit with modern fashions; Of Incest and such like diversions Permitted only to the Persians, Or Greeks to bring upon their stages— But that was in the earlier ages Besides my style is the romantic, Which some call fine, and some call frantic; While others are or would seem as sick Of repetitions ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... contrition takes away the eternity of punishment only, and not punishment itself; everyone must be punished or rewarded according to his works. He who will be soiled by a parricide or an incest will bear a chastisement different in pain and length to him who has not committed them; equality in expiatory suffering, in reparative ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... child is now capable of the choice of a love-object accompanied by erotic feelings. Because of the dependency of the child this first choice of a love-object is directed towards parents and nurses either of his own or of the opposite sex. "Incest complex"—Now too the child under the influence of occasional seduction may become polymorphous-perverse, that is, may become subject to any form of sexual perversion. He likewise shows a preference in the selection of his love-object ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... him in the Bull Maleficus pastor, in which the venerable pontiff was accused of being a disobedient member of the Church, a heretic, or one smelling of heresy, a keeper of concubines, a committer of incest, a corrupter of the people, an old woman and a meddling old fool, ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France

... the crime and consequences of incest is so plain in 'Manfred,' that it is astonishing that any one can pretend, as Galt does, that ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... nor to Tertullian, but to "the genius of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna." And yet he disliked the "enfranchising measure" quite as keenly as the clergyman who wrote to the Guardian about incest, though indeed he expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and everywhere, he betook himself to his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and understood in quarters which would never have listened ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... impulse of freedom in a relatively slight manner. Hence the law-maker's interference with his private life seems to him a customary and not too injurious encroachment on his individuality."[197] It thus comes about that a great many acts, of for the most part unquestioned immoral character—such as incest, the procuring of women for immoral purposes, and acts of a homosexual character—which, when adults are alone concerned, the French leave to be dealt with by the social reaction, are in Germany directly dealt with by the law. These things ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... All opinions or acts contrary to the Statutes of Supremacy and Uniformity fell within its cognizance. A right of deprivation placed the clergy at its mercy. It had power to alter or amend the statutes of colleges or schools. Not only heresy and schism and nonconformity, but incest or aggravated adultery were held to fall within its scope; its means of enquiry were left without limit, and it might fine or imprison at its will. By the mere establishment of such a court half the work of the Reformation ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... D'Aubigne, by "the celebrated and scandalous Tariff of Indulgences," which went through more than forty editions. The least delicate ears would be offended by an enumeration of all the horrors it contains. Incest, if not detected, was to cost five groats; and six, if it was known. There was a stated price for murder, infanticide, adultery, perjury, burglary, &c. Polygamy cost six ducats; sacrilege and perjury, nine; murder, eight; ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... very miscellaneous orgie, a great burlesque ball, which allowed of every kind of union, especially between near kindred. According to those authors, who would make us groan with horror, the main end of the Sabbath, the explicit doctrine taught by Satan, was incest; and in those great gatherings, sometimes of two thousand souls, the most startling deeds were done before ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... any man who holds the negative, I would demand the liberty of putting the case as strongly as I please. I will suppose a prince limited by laws like ours, yet running into a thousand caprices of cruelty like Nero or Caligula. I will suppose him to murder his mother and his wife, to commit incest, to ravish matrons, to blow up the senate, and burn his metropolis, openly to renounce God and Christ, and worship the devil. These and the like exorbitances are in the power of a single person to commit without the advice of a ministry, or assistance of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... devotion of the mind to God; and corporal, consisting in sacrifices, oblations, and so forth. Now men are hindered in the spiritual worship by sins, whereby men were said to be polluted, for instance, by idolatry, murder, adultery, or incest. From such pollutions men were purified by certain sacrifices, offered either for the whole community in general, or also for the sins of individuals; not that those carnal sacrifices had of themselves the power of expiating ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter- chest. The recital of them would be too horrible; it is enough to say, that in yon fatal apartment incest and unnatural murder were committed. I will restore it to the solitude, to which the better judgment of those who preceded me had consigned it; and never shall any one, so long as I can prevent it, be exposed to a repetition of the supernatural horrors which could ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... flying touch, Tantalus seeks, his long tongue's gain is such. While Juno's watchman Ioe too much eyed, Him timeless[245] death took, she was deified. I saw one's legs with fetters black and blue, By whom the husband his wife's incest[246] knew: More he deserved; to both great harm he framed, The man did grieve, the woman was defamed. 50 Trust me all husbands for such faults are sad, Nor make they any man that hears them glad. If he loves not, deaf ears thou dost importune, Or if he loves, thy tale breeds his misfortune. Nor ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... Pompey raised a legion out of his friends and tenants, scattered the few companies that tried to stop him, and rushed to the side of the deliverer. Others came, like Sergius Catiline or Oppianicus of Larino,[4] men steeped in crime, stained with murder, incest, adultery, forgery, and meaning to secure the fruits of their villanies by well-timed service. They were all welcome, and Sylla was not particular. His progress was less rapid than it promised to be at the outset. He easily defeated Norbanus; ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... lines of his character utterly impersonal, and where incidentally he shows any human feelings they are as a rule far from creditable to him. He created the universe from mechanical instinct or blind desire, and committed or tried to commit incest with his daughter (the accounts are various). He has begotten both the gods and the demons, devas and asuras, who are constantly at war with one another. The gods, who are embodiments of "truth" (that ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... in the descent of property, and from other still more recondite reasons; but I cannot accept this view, seeing that the savages of Australia and South America,[268] who have no property to bequeath or fine moral feelings to confuse, hold the crime of incest in abhorrence. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... eleventh Cheerfulness, a twelfth Exercise, a thirteenth Sobriety, etc. They are elected to duties of that kind, each one to that duty for excellence in which he is known from boyhood to be most suitable. Wherefore among them neither robbery nor clever murders, nor lewdness, incest, adultery, or other crimes of which we accuse one another, can be found. They accuse themselves of ingratitude and malignity when anyone denies a lawful satisfaction to another of indolence, of sadness, of anger, of scurrility, of slander, and of lying, which curseful thing they ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells

... deceased wife's sister. But ever as he spoke there was a film before her eyes. There was a gaunt priest, with canonical robes, stood before the gates of heaven. Before him and through him was the way to an eternal happiness, below him was a fiery hell; and he shouted with hoarse voice, Incest, incest, incest!—And ever as he shouted, he pointed with his finger of scorn at this Christian hell, and she conjured up in her mind the old stories of this priest, until she saw the livid flames rising up higher till they encircled her form, and then the priest ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... consecrate such a public opinion all through the city. 'Good: but how can you create it?' A fair objection; but I promised to try and find some means of restraining loves to their natural objects. A law which would extirpate unnatural love as effectually as incest is at present extirpated, would be the source of innumerable blessings, because it would be in accordance with nature, and would get rid of excess in eating and drinking and of adulteries and frenzies, ...
— Laws • Plato

... whole College of Cardinals with all their luxurious equipage. For it could not be supposed that he was withheld by any promptings of goodness or scruples of conscience; because in the breast of a profligate living in incest with his sister, and who to obtain the princedom had put his nephews and kinsmen to death, no virtuous impulse could prevail. So that the only inference to be drawn was, that men know not how to be splendidly wicked or wholly good, and shrink in consequence from such crimes as ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... the chief circumstance of which I have touched very delicately; for my principal doubt as to whether it would succeed as an acting play hangs entirely on the question as to whether any such a thing as incest in this shape, however treated, would be admitted on the stage. I think, however, it will form no objection; considering, first, that the facts are matter of history, and, secondly, the peculiar delicacy with which I have treated it. (In speaking of his mode of treating this ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... which it held to be contrary to the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. It altered or amended the Statutes of Schools and Colleges; it claimed the right of deprivation of clergy and held them at its mercy; it passed from decisions upon heresy, schism, or nonconformity to judgment and sentence upon incest and similar crimes. It could fine and imprison at will, and employ any measures for securing information or calling witnesses. The result was that all nonconformists and all Puritans drew closer together under trial. Another result was that the Bible was studied more earnestly ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

... Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions. Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... of unlawfully knowing a girl under the age of sixteen years, even with consent. Assume that with her invitation the man committed himself. Go further, and establish the sin of incest. The latter sin ought to be totally ignored in dealing with the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... again declare to us under what odious imputations the Christians lay, how general was the belief that these imputations were well-grounded, how sincere was the horror which the belief inspired. The multitude, convinced that the Christians were atheists who ate human flesh and thought incest no crime, displayed against them a fury so passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers. The severe expressions of Tacitus, exitiabilis superstitio—odio humani generis convicti,[217] show how deeply the prejudices of the multitude imbued the educated ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... have implications foreign to the original. An attempt to minimise misconceptions is made by suggesting alternative renderings in the Index. Further, by labelling a certain section, as the law of incest, for example, one definitely fixes the sense in which the translation is to be read. Hence it is hoped that the Index will be no less helpful than the translation in giving readers an idea of what the ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon

... MSS. here add, "This Vortimer, the son of Vortigern, in a synod held at Guartherniaun, after the wicked king, on account of the incest committed with his daughter, fled from the face of Germanus and the British clergy, would not consent to his father's wickedness; but returning to St. Germanus, and falling down at his feet, he sued for pardon; and in atonement for the calumny brought upon Germanus by his father and sister, gave ...
— History Of The Britons (Historia Brittonum) • Nennius

... Museum Catalogue continues to list this as a "translation" of Ovid's Metamorphoses, X. For a somewhat later example of an actual translation of this tale, considerably amplified, see James Gresham's (not Graham's, as in STC) The Picture of Incest, STC 18969 (1626), ed. Grosart (Manchester, 1876). In idiomatic English, occasionally ornamented with such triple epithets as "azure-veyned necke" and "Nectar-candied-words," Gresham expands Golding's Ovid by more than 300 lines. Although he invents a suitable brief description of Mirrha's ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale

... as the Pope called it, brought against the infallible Pope seventy-two charges—the murder of Pope Alexander V, rape, adultery, sodomy, incest, simony, corruption, poisoning, denying the resurrection and eternal ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann

... the Japanese system permitted a degree of licence which in the Occident is called incest: brothers and sisters might intermarry provided that they had not been brought up together. To understand this condition it is necessary to observe that a bride generally continued to live in her family dwelling ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... there is so much wickedness among them; adultery, war, incest, parricide. Well, I fancy these are not unknown among ourselves? And I am sure no one would think that a reason for saying that Uranus and Ge made a mistake in creating us. Or again, you will complain that we have so much trouble in looking after them. At that rate, a shepherd ought to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... which pierced your Sister's bosom; and it was I who warned Elvira in dreams of your designs upon her Daughter, and thus, by preventing your profiting by her sleep, compelled you to add rape as well as incest to the catalogue of your crimes. Hear, hear, Ambrosio! Had you resisted me one minute longer, you had saved your body and soul. The guards whom you heard at your prison door came to signify your pardon. But I had already triumphed: My plots ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... nail drives out another: but above all things the man thus afflicted should be advised what madness love is: for of all the perturbations of the mind, there is not one which is more vehement; for, (without charging it with rapes, debaucheries, adultery, or even incest, the baseness of any of these being very blameable; not, I say, to mention these,) the very perturbation of the mind in love is base of itself, for, to pass over all its acts of downright madness, what weakness do not those very things ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... moral offence charged upon him than that his sister could be guilty of inventing the story and then of perjuring herself to support it, we can but reply, that Lady Rocheford, wife of Anne Boleyn's brother, testified that Anne had been guilty of incest with that brother, and afterward, when about to die, admitted that she had perjured herself. Of the two offences, supposing Lady Richmond to have sworn away her brother's life, that of Lady Rocheford was by far the more criminal, and it is beyond all doubt. So long as there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... marvellous that a man who did not refrain from doing deeds of incest and murder, should be so scrupulous about violating an oath that ought never to have been sworn? You have thought that you were bound to go through with your engagement, because you had pledged yourself, although you know that it would condemn ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... refers to the caresses of Spurio and the wanton Duchess. Each is of such amazing propriety, is so keenly discriminated, is so obviously the product of an imagination burning with rage and hate, that it strikes you like an affront: each is an incest taken in the fact and branded there and then. And this quality of verbal fitness, this power of so charging a phrase with energy and colour as to make it convey the emotion of the writer at the instant of inspiration, is perhaps the master ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... Berkley coldly, "that those who are of kindred souls, rarely wed together; almost as rarely as those who are akin by blood. There seems, indeed, to be such a thing as spiritual incest. Therefore, mad lover, do not think to persuade thyself and thy scornful lady, that you have kindred souls; but rather the contrary; that you are much unlike; and each wanting in those qualities which most mark and distinguish the other. ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... drowning was inflicted on a beer-seller for selling beer too cheaply; on a woman for adultery, for being a bad wife, for incest, or for desertion of her husband's house. In every case the victim was a woman. When men were drowned they shared a woman's fate. In two cases, adultery and incest, we read of the criminals being bound. ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... prodigality. All this was set down to the debauchery of a rich old man, and everything was believed except the truth. The father's sentiment for Marguerite had, in truth, so pure a cause that anything but a communion of hearts would have seemed to him a kind of incest, and he had never spoken to her a word which his daughter might not ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils

... referred to him. His headquarters are at the monastery of Sringeri on the Cauvery river in Mysore. Mr. Joshi gives four offences as punishable with permanent exclusion from caste: killing a Brahman, drinking prohibited wine or spirits, committing incest with a mother or step-mother or with the wife of one's spiritual preceptor, and stealing gold from a priest. Some very important offences, therefore, such as murder of any person other than a Brahman, adultery with a woman of impure caste ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... Power: but he alone understands how to avail himself of it who comprehends the necessity of never revealing it. If Å’dipus, in place of slaying the Sphynx, had conquered it, and driven it into Thebes harnessed to his chariot, he would have been King, without incest, calamities, or exile. If Psyche, by submission and caresses, had persuaded Love to reveal himself, she would never have lost him. Love is one of the mythological images of the grand secret and the grand agent, because it expresses at once an action and a passion, a void and a plenitude, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... you beast! O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? 135 Is't not a kind of incest, to take life From thine own sister's shame? What should I think? Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance! 140 Die, perish! Might but my bending down Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed: ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... Gentleman's Magazines) the allusions to an incestuous passion between Manfred and Astarte. Shelley, in a letter to Mrs. Gisborne, November 16, 1819, commenting on Calderon's Los Cabellos de Absalon, discusses the question from an ethical as well as critical point of view: "The incest scene between Amon and Tamar is perfectly tremendous. Well may Calderon say, in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... age I have just mentioned,—a celebrated Speaker, whose genius may be easily decided from his Orations. For, among several others, we have a noble Speech of his for Ser. Fulvius, in a prosecution for incest. When we were children, it was esteemed the best then extant; but now it is almost overlooked among the numerous performances of the same kind which have been lately published."—"I am very sensible," replied ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... that God would give him a sign, which accordingly happened; upon which the old man took his youngest daughter by the hand, and gave her to the wise prophet immediately for his wife, who without further ceremony took the damsel and deflowered her. Thus for some time they continued in acts of incest and adultery, until that period which made the fatal discovery, and introduced the bloody scene ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt

... harbour'd swellings against you, They could not hurt you, and it is in you To give me sorrow, that will render me Apt to receive your mercy; rather so, Let it be rather so, than punish me With such unmanly sins: Incest is in me Dwelling already, and it must be holy That pulls it thence, ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... had no such scruples. Incest appears to have had in his eyes peculiar charms; for he offered himself three times to three different sisters-in-law. He seems also to have known the secret of getting quit of his wives when they became inconvenient. In state matters he spared no one whom he feared; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... incest received no punishment, but the guilty man was deported to an island.[94] If the incest involved adultery, the woman was of course held on ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... Incest, which is peculiarly the crime of the weak, the wretched and the poor, has a somewhat different origin. Westermarck in his "History of Human Marriage" shows that in the early tribe there was no inhibition against the marriage of blood relations; that the restriction ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... these, the 'suasoriae,' as being the lighter and requiring less of experience, are given to the little boys, the 'controversiae' to the bigger lads. But—oh heavens, what they are—what miserable compositions!" Then he tells us the subjects selected. Rape, incest, and other horrors are subjected to the lads for their declamation, in order that they may learn ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... left alive on the face of the earth, notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse 21), "I will not overthrow this city," Zoar; but Zoar evidently was overthrown. And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish, committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two great and extensive tribes or races of men, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... and Central Australia are governed in their social life by marriage laws and class systems of the most intricate kind. It is generally supposed that these laws have for their object prevention of consanguinity and incest. The laws are strictly adhered to, any offender against them being punished by death. I owe the information on this subject to Mr. Stretch, who took great pains to make clear to me the fundamental principles, from which I have worked out the various combinations. I have tried to arrange ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... pincers, and burnt alive. The heads of that company, in the account which they render to the chancellor of this their sentence, testify that this cure was in truth accused of sorcery, but that he had been condemned to the flames as guilty, and convicted of spiritual incest with his penitent, Madelaine de la Palu. From all this it is concluded that there is no reality in what ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... hearts and not your armaments. Let us learn to look War in the face, and while the blood is cold, so that we may know what we are meaning to do. Let us put a moral taboo upon it, such as we have put upon parricide, or incest, or cannibalism. For certain, in those matters, the reason has put a sanction on the conscience. So will it in the matter of aggressive war. Side by side with that, as we now see, we must change the governance of nations. If those who do a nation's ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett

... remembered that Ambrosio, after having enjoyed Antonia, to whose bedchamber he has gained admittance by demoniacal aid, discovers that she is his sister, and heaping crime upon crime to sorcery and rape he has added incest. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... "My daughter,—from her age; and haply she— "My sire,—lest names were wanting to their crime. "Fill'd with her father from the bed she rose, "Bearing in her dire womb the impious fruit; "Carrying her crime conceiv'd. Th' ensuing night "Her incest she repeats, nor ends she here. "But Cinyras eager at length to know, "After such frequent converse, who him lov'd; "At once his daughter and his sin beheld, "By lamps brought sudden. Grief repress'd all words; "But from the sheath he snatch'd his glittering sword. "Quick Myrrha ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... is a step leading up to the tribal stage of morality, and it may be that the idea of incest marks the social stage in which the moral sphere was conterminous with the family, corresponding to the institution of exogamy in the moral system of ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... rather harsh words, and yet it is my opinion that lust continued hitherto within certain limits, inasmuch as they neither committed incest with their mothers, as later the inhabitants of Canaan, nor polluted themselves with the vice of the Sodomites. Moses confines his charge to their casting aside the legal trammels set by the patriarchs and recognizing ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... receive correction; they have not returned. Pestilence he hath sent, but they have not turned to him," Amos iv. [839]Herod could not abide John Baptist, nor [840]Domitian endure Apollonius to tell the causes of the plague at Ephesus, his injustice, incest, adultery, and the like. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... when a man had married his first wife's sister, and after her death the bishop's court was proceeding to annul the marriage and bastardize the issue, the court of king's bench granted a prohibition quoad hoc; but permitted them to proceed to punish the husband for incest[e]. These canonical disabilities, being entirely the province of the ecclesiastical courts, our books are perfectly silent concerning them. But there are a few statutes, which serve as directories to those courts, of which it will be proper to take notice. By statute ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... It was not the eating of the forbidden fruit; for that had been done long before. It was not murder; for Cain had murdered his brother. It was not drunkenness; for Noah, though a preacher of righteousness, did get drunk. It was not incest; for Lot, another preacher of righteousness, committed that. It was not that of one brother selling his own brother as a slave, to be taken to a strange land; for Joseph's brethren did that, and ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne

... enabled him to maintain; and these petty tyrants, no longer amenable to the exercise of the law, perpetrated with impunity the wildest excesses of fantastic oppression and cruelty. In Auvergne alone, a report was made of more than three hundred of these independent nobles, to whom incest, murder, and rapine were the most ordinary and ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... by no means banishes vice; it merely consents that it shall be made attractive; its charms are advertised and its penalties suppressed. "Now, it is futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representation and discussion of illegal operations, incest, and venereal disease. If the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution, it must be thrown open to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... that they should be all summoned to attend in public; and they, fearing the torments they saw the saints undergo, and instigated by the soldiers, accused us falsely of odious deeds, such as the banquet of Thyestes, the incest of OEdipus, and other crimes which must not be named or even thought of, and which we cannot bring ourselves to believe that men were ever guilty of. These reports having once spread amongst the people, even those persons who ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... four turonenses for a layman; ab incestu pro laico in foro conscientiae turonenses quatuor. For the man and the woman who have committed incest, eighteen turonenses four ducats and nine carlins. That is not just; if one person pays only four turonenses, the two ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... the poor compel the children to witness everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them. Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... that has come upon me bursts with too clear and scorching a blaze of light for me to see any chance of escape or mitigation. Even if Evelyn were the daughter of Alice by another, she would be forever separated from me. The mother and the child! there is a kind of incest even in that thought! But such an alleviation of my anguish is forbidden to my reason. No, poor Alice, I will not disturb the repose thou hast won at last! Thou shalt never have the grief to know that our error ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... storehouse of fearful and ferocious happenings; it was a catalogue, an inventory of disease, seduction, theft, robbery, larceny, assassination, murder, catastrophe, pest, incest, suicide, duel, bankruptcy, and the never ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... most touching form, and repentance in its bitterest shape. When the prophet Nathan reproved him for the murder of Uriah, he confessed his sin with tears, fell on his face before God, bravely accepted the most terrible punishment: incest and murder in his family, the rebellion and death of his son, treason, misery, and a desperate flight in the woods; and with what urgency he implores for pardon in the 'Miserere,' with what love and contrition he cries to the God ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... boys in female attire. They fed on human flesh, as we do on beef, having wooden cages in every town, in which men, women, and children, were kept and fed for that purpose, to which all the prisoners taken in war were destined. Incest was common among them, and they were extremely addicted to drunkenness. They had as many wives as they pleased. From these and many other abominations, it was the will of God that we should be the humble instruments to clear the land; substituting ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr

... Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the situation which in A King and No King is only apparent, becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the Broken Heart, is a prolonged and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... too, memorial of his name! is found A tomb in marble ruins on the ground. This gloomy tyrant, whose despotic sway Compell'd the trembling nations to obey, 120 Through Greece for murder, rape, and incest known, The Muses raised to high Olympus' throne; For oft, alas! their venal strains adorn The prince whom blushing virtue holds in scorn: Still Rome and Greece record his endless fame, And hence yon mountain yet retains his name. But ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... despotism, as the sun thaws ice upon an April morning. It was enough, he thought, to hurl the glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant's face—to sow the "Necessity of Atheism" broadcast on the bench of Bishops, and to depict incest in his poetry, not because he wished to defend it, but because society must learn to face the most abhorrent problems with impartiality. Gifted with a touch as unerring as Ithuriel's spear for the unmasking ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... returned to his allegiance and acted as a spy on the Imperial army, was deputed to treat with him. As soon as he arrived, Ali began to enact a comedy in the intention of rebutting the accusation of incest with his daughter-in-law Zobeide; for this charge, which, since Veli himself had revealed the secret of their common shame, could only be met by vague denials, had never ceased to produce a most unfavourable impression on Noutza's mind. Scarcely had he entered the castle ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... Greek commentator calls it, of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure its death and yet avoid having actually murdered it (Schol. Eur. Phoen., 26); the whole treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles

... of the matter has been further extended by the distinguished French sociologist, Durkheim. Investigating the origins of the prohibition of incest, and arguing that it proceeds from the custom of exogamy (or marriage outside the clan), and that this rests on certain ideas about blood, which, again, are traceable to totemism,—a theory which we need not here discuss,—Durkheim ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... hand light-headed Bacchus hung, And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was; The town of Sestos call'd it Venus' glass: There might you see the gods, in sundry shapes, Committing heady riots, incest, rapes; For know, that underneath this radiant flour Was Danaee's statue in a brazen tower; Jove slily stealing from his sister's bed, To dally with Idalian Ganymed, And for his love Europa bellowing loud, And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud; Blood-quaffing Mars heaving the iron ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman

... lies at his mother's door; it is her conduct that has put out the light of her son's life. She who had been to him the type of all excellence, she whom his father had idolized, has within a month of his death married his uncle, and is living in habitual incest—for as such, a marriage of the kind was then unanimously regarded. To Hamlet's condition and behaviour, his mother, her past and her present, is the only and sufficing key. His very idea of unity had been ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... perplexity respecting the place where his Eminence will find an abode. The French dislike him so much, that they will have him neither as master nor as servant; the Italians know his tricks; the Spaniards cannot endure his rage; the Germans abhor incest; the English and Scotch hold him to be a traitor; the Turk and the Sophy are Mohammedans, while the cardinal believes in nothing! Heaven is closed against the unbeliever, the devils would be afraid to have ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... help it. The Canonists and Schoolmen were with me. 'Thou shalt not wed thy brother's wife.'—'Tis written, 'They shall be childless.' True, Mary was born, But France would not accept her for a bride As being born from incest; and this wrought Upon the king; and child by child, you know, Were momentary sparkles out as quick Almost as kindled; and he brought his doubts And fears to me. Peter, I'll swear for him He did ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... phantoms, like a row of statues, Stood dull as in our temples, but she still Embraced me, while I shrunk from her, as if, In lieu of her remote descendant, I Had been the son who slew her for her incest.[25] Then—then—a chaos of all loathsome things Thronged thick and shapeless: I was dead, yet feeling— 160 Buried, and raised again—consumed by worms, Purged by the flames, and withered in the air! I can fix nothing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... were, of course, different from those established by the mediaeval church, and brother weds brother's widow in good archaic fashion. Foster-sister and foster-brother may marry, as Saxo notices carefully. The Wolsung incest is not noticed by Saxo. He only knew, apparently, the North-German form of the Niflung story. But the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... Nanette; and, vanity apart, I have been pretty fortunate in my amours." This information shocked me not a little, as I was well convinced of his intimacy with her sister; and though I did not care to tax him with downright incest, I professed my astonishment at his last night's choice, when, I supposed, the other was at his devotion. To this hint he answered that, besides his natural complaisance to the sex, he had another reason to distribute his favours equally between them, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... lives" ("The Prophet of Nazareth," by E.P. Meredith, notes, pp. 225, 226). Mr. Meredith then points out how in Rome, in Lyons, in Vienne, "the Christians were actually accused of murdering children and others—of committing adultery, incest, and other flagrant crimes in their secret lovefeasts. The question, therefore, arises—were they really guilty of the barbarous crimes with which they were so often formally charged, and for the commission of which they were almost as often legally condemned, and ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... Feigning to eat of cakes of rye, Deflower his sister fair to see, Which was foul incest; and hereby Was Herod moved, it is no lie, To lop the head of Baptist John For dance and jig and psaltery; Good luck has he ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... wicked brothers as he permitted the adulterous queens to escape the sword of Kamar al-Zaman. Dr. Steingass brings to my notice that I have failed to do justice to the story of Sharrkan (vol. ii., p. 172), where I note that the interest is injured by the gratuitous incest But this has a deeper meaning and a grander artistic effect. Sharrkan begins with most unbrotherly feelings towards his father's children by a second wife. But Allah's decree forces him to love his half-sister despite himself, and awe and repentance convert the savage, who joys at the news ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... all the blame for the rift with Shelley upon herself and transferred the physical alienation to the break in sympathy with Godwin. That she turned these facts into a story of incest is undoubtedly due to the interest which she and Shelley felt in the subject at this time. They regarded it as a dramatic and effective theme. In August of 1819 Shelley completed The Cenci. During its progress he had talked over with Mary the arrangement of scenes; ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... Vitelli, as Machiavelli tells us, while being strangled by Caeesar Borgia's assassin, implored his murderer to procure for him the absolution of that murderer's father. Gianpaolo Baglioni, who reigned by parricide and lived in incest, was severely blamed by the Florentines for not killing Pope Julius II. when the latter was his guest at Perugia. And when Gabrino Fondato, the tyrant of Cremona, was on the scaffold, his only regret was that when he had taken his guests, the Pope and Emperor, ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... an omitted rite, an error in the ceremonial tribute paid to the marble idol, was held a deeper sin than adultery, incest, or blood shedding. And the bare thought of the vengeance due for a broken oath would often times keep sleepless, with mere dread, the eyes of men who could have slumbered calmly on the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... thoughts, and even of expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory) his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in point. But of course the main nursery of such things is ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... abominable and terrible tyrants that the principle of absolute and irresponsible power ever produced. There was one vice in particular, a vice which they seem to have adopted from the Asiatic nations of the Persian empire, that resulted in the most awful consequences. This vice was incest. ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott

... Rauyne Sturdy vyolence Fals Iugement {with} Obstynacyon Dysceyt Dronknes & Improuydence. Boldnes in yll {with} foule and Rybaudy. Fornycacyon Incest and Auoutry Vnshamfastnes {with} Prodygalyte Blasfeme vaynglory ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous

... clothing! As if whips, chains, thumb-screws, paddles, blood-hounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all indispensable to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their ruthless oppressors! As if, when the marriage institution is abolished, concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... There is a general community of women and of men, but also a community of children, Strabo reports (sixty-six years before our reckoning) that, among the Arabians, brothers cohabited with sisters and with their own mother. On any route other than that of incest, the increase of population is nowhere possible, if, as alleged in the Bible also, descent from one couple is granted. The Bible itself contradicts itself on this delicate point. It is stated there that Cain, after he had murdered his brother Abel, took a wife of another people. Whence came ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... duffling academy. You know very well how at Brignoles, when the religious nun, Sister Fatbum, was made big with child by the young Stiffly-stand-to't, her pregnancy came to be known, and she cited by the abbess, and, in a full convention of the convent, accused of incest. Her excuse was that she did not consent thereto, but that it was done by the violence and impetuous force of the Friar Stiffly-stand-to't. Hereto the abbess very austerely replying, Thou naughty wicked girl, why didst thou not cry, A rape, a rape! then should all of us have run to thy ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... various ways of the Imperial agents; even the two mother-universities, Bologna and Paris, had declared in his favour. He protested that he had been thereby enabled in his conscience to free himself from the yoke of an unlawful union, bordering on incest, and to proceed to another marriage. But all the more urgent was it that the legality of this marriage should be recognised according to the forms at that time lawfully valid. He no longer wished for a recognition from the Pope; he laid the question before the two ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... to trust it to administer a government in accordance with republican ideas; for it acknowledges a higher law than even the human conscience, in the will of a person whom it professes to believe a vicegerent of Divinity, and in obedience to whom perjury, robbery, incest, and even murder, may be justifiable,—for his commands are those of Heaven. It is obvious that it is fruitless to anticipate fair dealing from a people professing such doctrines; and the result has shown, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... against them; but in sleep it escapes the observation of people and the law, and, being as far as possible removed from fear or modesty, gives every passion play, and excites its depravity and licentiousness, for, to borrow Plato's expression,[217] "it attempts incest with its mother, and procures for itself unlawful meats, and abstains from no action whatever," and enjoys lawlessness as far as is practicable in visions and phantasies, that end in no complete pleasure or satisfaction, but ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... in one of the Chinese commentaries the following reason is given for this law: "When husband and wife are of the same surname, their children do not do well and multiply." The prohibited degrees were more distant than among us. It was a horror of incest that had led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children for adoption. Only this explanation could reconcile it with the almost superstitious love the Polynesian father and mother have for children. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... write Manfred;" and of one of his critics he says to Murray, "It had a better origin than he can devise or divine, for the soul of him." In any case most methods of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied, convict Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakespeare of murder, Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of compacts with the devil. Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit enough to vary at least the circumstances of his projected personality. The memories of both Fausts—the Elizabethan ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... as chiefs, nor have they anything to say in the council. A chief would be deposed for any conduct causing general disgust or dissatisfaction, such as incest (marrying within his gens) or lack of generosity. Though crime in the abstract would not tend to create dissatisfaction with a chief, yet if he murdered, without sufficient cause, one whose kindred ...
— Siouan Sociology • James Owen Dorsey

... speaks unclean things from perfect inanition. The very concubine of so impure a wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of such a husband! For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... a planet entered into a sign, they made of this conjunction a marriage, an adultery, an incest.* Having said that the planet was hid or buried, when it came back to light, and ascended to its exaltation, they said that it had died, risen again, was carried ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... weighty affairs of State to descend into petty descriptions of the erratic conduct of Messalina, with her extravagant lewdness (XI. 26-8), Nero, with his abominable pollutions (XVI. 37), and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, even if true of the ancient Romans in the first century of our aera, Tacitus, we may be certain, would have avoided as not coming within the scope of the historian's province, and as being altogether uncongenial ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... M. de Monmouth was much worse than the Comte de Guiche; because, although a bastard, he was the son of Madame's own brother; and this incest doubled the crime. Madame de Thiange, sister of Madame de Montespan, conducted the intrigue between the Duke of Monmouth ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans

... coincidence, this prosaic resumption of the broken narrative, is nave at least, but can hardly commend itself to any critic as being other than commonplace and bathetic. The story itself, as related by the dying man is a tale of accidental incest told quietly, earnestly, but without a suggestion of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... [this is the rigor][181] denies children begotten in Adultery or incest aliments, which tho harsh, condemning the innocent for the guilty, yet they think it may serve to deterre the parents from ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... the same family have such frequent opportunities of licence of this kind, that nothing could prevent purity of manners, were marriage allowed, among the nearest relations, or any intercourse of love between them ratified by law and custom. Incest, therefore, being PERNICIOUS in a superior degree, has also a superior turpitude and moral ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume

... to be blest and Sanctyfyed by the poluted words and hands of a wretched priest, a Spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a Monster of Nature and a Servant to the Devill, Who for a Riall will pretend to absolve them from perjury, Incest and parricide, and Cannonize them for Cruelties Committed to we Herreticks, as they stile us, and Even Rank them in the Number of those Cursed Saints who by their Barbarity have Rendered their Names Immortall and Odious to all true Beleivers. tis by such Devills they Swear and ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various

... highly concentrated essence of all conceivable wickedness. Theft, robbery, pollution, unbridled passion, incest, cruelty, cold-blooded murder, blasphemy, and defiance of the laws of God. It teaches children to disregard parental authority. It tears down the marriage altar, and tramples its sacred ashes under its feet. It creates and nourishes polygamy. It feeds ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... sister of Anasterax, with whom she lived in incest. The fairy Zorphee was her godmother, and enchanted her, in order to break off this connection.—Vasco de Lobeira, Amadis de ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... the charges brought against the House of Borgia some testimony exists; for many others—and these are the more lurid, sensational, and appalling covering as they do rape and murder, adultery, incest, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain—no single grain of real evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, at this time of day evidence is no longer called for where the sins of the Borgias are concerned. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... was to plead for toleration; and consequently he employed himself in vindicating the Christians from various charges, such as incest, Thyestean banquets; and retaliated ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... doing something unlawful that he fell into the subsequent sin. Nevertheless, the resulting sin is diminished, even as the character of voluntariness is diminished. Wherefore Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 44) that "Lot's guilt is to be measured, not by the incest, but by his drunkenness." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... nursed for a lifetime, and when the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest human instincts—such as mother love—can avert the blow. Signy in the "Voelsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of the Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems the only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment's hesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason's safety; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... lived otherwise than happily together. But, if all tales were true, she had no reason to regard him as a very faithful husband or a blameless man. She may not have known (for nobody but Merlin apparently did know) the early and unwitting incest of the King and his half-sister Margause; but the extreme ease with which he adopted her own treacherous foster-sister, the "false Guinevere," and his proceedings with the Saxon enchantress Camilla, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... victim of Agrippina and the freedmen, who feared as well as hated her, than to accept the authority of Tacitus and Juvenal. On the death of Messalina, Agrippina married her uncle, and the Senate sanctioned the union, which was incest by the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord



Words linked to "Incest" :   criminal congress, unlawful carnal knowledge



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