TOBIAS AND SARA—JUS PRIALE NOCTIS 433 



wearing of and the fumigation with the glands of a fish, to 

 ensure that " the demons will flee from him." 



The jealous passion of demons or devils for maidens colours 

 Asian, African, and European folk-lores. They lie in wait for 

 married couples ; sternly guard their so-called brides. 1 Other- 

 wise they were usually innocuous. Tobias argues with the 

 angel, " If I go in unto her, I die as the others before : for a 

 wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth nobody, but those that 

 come in unto her " (vi. 14). 



According to the Testament of Solomon, Asmodeus (the 

 demon) avows, " my business is to plot against the newly 

 wedded, so that they may not know one another. I sever them 

 by many calamities, and I waste away the beauty of virgin 

 women." In Asmodeus we recognise a male counterpart of 

 Lihth and her dangerous relations with men. The demon, in 

 fact, regards the virgin as his own, himself as her true and 

 constant lover, and resents, prevents, or " avenges any infringe- 

 ment of his jus primcB nociis." - 



The misconception, evident in the last eight words of this 

 learned wTiter, as to what constituted the jus primes nociis 

 prevails widely. As the^z^s is the child, strange as the parentage 

 may appear, of the tale of Tobias and Sara, it seems worth our 

 while to notice the strangely erroneous views held both as to the 

 possessor of the jus and the occasion of its exercise, and shortly 

 to explain, even at the risk of seeming to stray from fishing 

 into folklore, the origin and the estabhshment of the custom. 



According to popular beUef the superior or lord of the fee, 

 among other feudal privileges, possessed, as such, the vested right 

 of connection with the daughters of his tenantry or of holders of 

 land under him on the first night of their marriages. Some 

 WTiters on the French Revolution, indeed, indignantly class 

 the wide and brutal exercise of this right on chaste maidens by 

 licentious seigneurs as not the least, perhaps one of the most 

 provocative, of the social causes, which led to the detestation and 

 subsequent massacre of the noblesse in many Mpartements and 

 to the overthrow of the old landed system ! 



1 J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (London, IQ18), 520 ff. 

 ^ R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 74-75- 



