That’s why religious people say that marriages are “made in heaven”…a strange kind of heaven, because if these marriages are made in heaven, then what can you make in hell? They don’t show the signs, the fragrance, the freshness, the beauty of heaven. They are certainly disgusting, ugly…they show something of hell certainly. But man settled for marriage because that was the only way to have private property.
Animals don’t have private property – they are all communists, and far better communists than have appeared in human history. They don’t have any dictatorship of the proletariat and they have not lost their freedom, but they don’t have any private property.
Man also lived for thousands of years without marriage, but those were the days when there was no private property. Those were the days of hunting; man was a hunter. And those people thousands of years ago had no cold-storage system, no technology – whatever food they got they had to finish as quickly as possible. They could only hope that tomorrow they will get some food again.
Because there was nothing to accumulate, there was no question of marriage. People lived in communes, tribes; people loved, people reproduced, but in the beginning there was no word for father. The word mother is far more ancient and far more natural. You will be surprised to know that the word uncle is older than the word father – because all the people who were the age of your father…you didn’t know who your father was. Men and women were mixing joyously – without any compulsion, without any legal bondage, out of their free will. If they wanted to meet and be together there was no question of domination. The children never knew who their father was, they knew only their mother. And they knew many men in the tribe; someone amongst those men must have been their father, hence they were all uncles.
As private property came into existence with cultivation…. With hunting, man could not survive long. People have destroyed complete species of animals. Hundreds of species which once used to dance and sing on this earth…man has eaten them up. Something had to be done because hunting was not reliable. Today you may get food, tomorrow you may have to be hungry. And it was very arduous. The search for animals did not allow man to develop any of his other talents, his genius. But cultivation changed the whole life of man.
You must be reminded of the fact that cultivation is the discovery of women, not of men. The woman was confined – she was not able to go hunting. Most of the time she was pregnant, she was weak, she was carrying another soul within her. She needed care, protection…so she was living in the house. She started making the living space more beautiful – and this you can see even today, after thousands of years.
If you enter into a bachelor’s room you can immediately say that it is a bachelor’s room. You may not be able to decide by seeing the bachelor whether he is bachelor or not, but his room certainly is a bachelor! The woman, her touch, is missing. The house of a bachelor is never a home, it is just a place where he sleeps. It is not something with which he feels a certain intimacy, a certain creative relationship.