GENERAL WORDS FOR SEX AND KINSHIP 175 



Even Freyr and Freyja find something of counterparts 

 in the deities Liber and Libitina, the first a god of 

 lust, and the second a goddess of death ; but probably, 

 like Freyja and other mother -goddesses, originally a 

 goddess of fertility as well as a goddess of death, 1 a 

 view confirmed by the identification of Libitina with 

 Persephone. 2 In the form tib or lub\ the sense of liber 

 passes essentially to that of pleasure, desire, lust, sex- 

 love. The Sanskrit root is lubli or lob, desire ; lubdha 

 is lustful, and such words as Latin lubere and lubido 

 indicate the peculiar significance. The root appears in 

 Slavonic ljub, whence ljuba, a spouse; A.S. lidf, O.F. 

 liaf, a spouse, male lover ; M.H.G. Hep, the liebchen 

 or loved one. Then we have a whole round of cognates 

 in lieb and love, which the reader can easily follow up 

 if he desires to trace how mankind has evolved the 

 noblest of human attributes out of an original lust. 3 

 What is quite clear is that the primitive value of lub is 

 sexual desire, and this root corresponds completely to 

 frt, although the notion of freedom has only remained 

 in the Latin liber. 



Connected with the same root we have the German 

 verlobung, although, perhaps, indirectly. The primi- 

 tive notion of desire, lust, changes in the Gothic galubs 

 to the desired, the valued ; and hence, through the 

 idea of praised, approved, as in loben and geloben, to 

 the conception of a mutual approval, contract, vow, 



1 Compare the Celtic Tailltiu, at once a goddess of death and agriculture, 

 i.e. fertility. See p. 200. 



2 Persephone was undoubtedly a goddess of fertility ; it is characteristic 

 that she was the child of a brother-sister union. 



3 The notion in lust of relaxation, freedom (Teutonic his, to set free), may 

 itself be compared with the idea of freedom in liber and frei. 



