Encyclopedia
Incest is sexual activity between close
family members.
Incest is considered taboo, and forbidden in the majority of current and historical
cultures. The precise meaning of the word varies widely, because different cultures have differing notions of "sexual activity" and "close family member." Some cultures consider only those related by birth, while others include those related by
adoption or marriage. Some prohibit sexual relations between people who grew up in the same household, while others prohibit sexual relations between people who grew up in related households.
Incest can occur between same-sex as well as opposite-sex relatives. It can also occur between related children as well as between parents and their children. In addition, there have been cases of incest between adult relatives.
Incest between close blood-relations is a crime in most
Western nations, as well as in those nations that were
colonised by the West, although again the extent of the definition of "close" varies. There are wide differences between nations as to how serious the crime of incest is. In some countries, such as
Australia, incest is a serious indictable offence, while in others it is a minor crime with much less serious consequences.
Inbreeding among animals
Biologically,
animals may have an aversion or inclination to inbreeding based on specific local circumstances and
evolutionary trends. In some species, most notably
bonobos, sexual activity, including between closely related individuals, is a means of dispute resolution or even a greeting. Incest between family members, including parents and children occurs; however, incest between a mother and immature sons, who are less than four years old, has not been observed.
The pattern of parenting behavior combined with the structure of dominance hierarchies among many species of animals serves to discourage inbreeding. For example, offspring, in some cases only the male offspring, are often driven away by the mother at about the same age they reach sexual maturity.
Distinctions between incest and inbreeding
The concepts of "incest" and "inbreeding" are not synonymous.
Incest refers to socially taboo sexual activity between individuals who are considered to be too closely related to enter into marriage. In other words, it is a social and cultural term.
Inbreeding, on the other hand, refers to procreation between individuals with varying degrees of
genetic closeness only, regardless of their relative social positions. It is a scientific term rather than a social or cultural term.
In many societies, the definition of incest and the degree of inbreeding may correlate positively. For example, sexual relations between people of a given degree of genetic closeness is considered incestuous. In other societies, the correlation may not be as obvious. Many cultures consider relationship between
parallel cousins incestuous, but not those between
cross cousins, although the degree of genetic relationship does not differ. Relationships may be considered incestuous even when there is no genetic relationship at all: stepparent-stepchild relationships, or between a man and his sister-in-law, or a woman and her brother-in-law, have been considered incestuous, even though they involve no risk of inbreeding above that of the original marriage.
The consequence of inbreeding is to increase the frequency of homozygotes within a population. Depending on the size of the population and the number of generations in which inbreeding occurs, the increase of homozygotes may have either good or bad effects.
Genetics
Inbreeding leads to an increase in homozygosity, that is, the same allele at the same locus on both members of a chromosome pair. This occurs because close relatives are much more likely to share the same alleles than unrelated individuals. This is especially important for recessive alleles that happen to be deleterious, which are harmless and inactive in a heterozygous pairing, but when homozygous can cause serious developmental defects. Such offspring have a much higher chance of death before reaching the age of reproduction, leading to what biologists call
inbreeding depression, a measurable decrease in fitness due to inbreeding among populations with deleterious recessives. Recessive genes which can contain various genetic problems have a tendency of showing up more often if joined by someone who has the same gene. If a son who has
hemophilia becomes intimate with his sister who may have the same gene for hemophilia, and they have a child, the odds are in favor that the child will have hemophilia as well.
Some anthropologists are critical of including biology in the study of the incest taboo, and have argued that there can be no biological basis for inbreeding aversion because inbreeding may in fact be a good thing. Leavitt is a good representative of this point of view, writing that "small inbreeding populations, while initially increasing their chances for harmful homozygotic recessive pairings on a locus, will quickly eliminate such genes from their breeding pools, thus reducing their genetic loads"
Other specialists claim that this notion betrays a misunderstanding of basic genetics and natural selection. They argue that, while technically possible, the proposed positive long-term effects of inbreeding are almost always unrealized because the short-term fitness depression is enough for selection to discourage inbreeding. Such a scenario has only occurred under extremely unusual circumstances, either in major population bottlenecks, or forced artificial selection by animal husbandry. In order for such a "purification" to work, the offspring of close mate pairings must only be homozygous dominant and recessive . If there are heterozygous offspring, they will be able to transmit the defective genes without themselves feeling any effects. What's more, this model does not account for multiple deleterious recessives , or multi-locus gene linkages. The introduction of mutations negates the weeding out of bad genes, and evidence exists that homozygous individuals are often more at risk to pathogenic predation. Because of these complications, it is extremely difficult to overcome the initial "hump" of fitness penalties incurred by inbreeding.
Therefore, it is not surprising that inbreeding is uncommon in nature, and most sexually-reproducing species have mechanisms built in by natural selection to avoid mating with close kin. Pusey & Worf and Penn & Potts both have found evidence that some species possess evolved psychological aversions to inbreeding, via kin-recognition heuristics.
Given such overwhelming evidence of inbreeding depression as being an important force in sexual reproduction,
evolutionary psychologists have argued that humans should possess similar psychological heuristics against incest. The
Westermarck effect is one strong piece of evidence in favor of this, indicating that children who are raised together in the same family find each other sexually uninteresting, even when there is strong social pressure for them to mate. In what is now a key study of the Westermarck's hypothesis, the
anthropologist Melford E. Spiro demonstrated that inbreeding aversion between siblings is predicatably linked to co-residency. In a cohort study of children raised as communal, that is to say, fictive, siblings in the Kiryat Yedidim
kibbutz in the
1950s, Spiro found practically no intermarriage between his subjects as adults, despite positive pressure from parents and community. The social experience of having grown up
as brothers and sisters created an incest aversion, even though genetically speaking the children were not related.
Further studies have backed up the hypothesis that some psychological mechanisms are in play that "turn off" children who grow up together.
Spiro's study is corroborated by Fox , who found similar results in Israeli kibbutzum. Likewise, Wolf and Huang report similar aversions in Taiwanese "child" marriages, where the future wife was brought into the family and raised together with her fiancee. Such marriages were notoriously difficult to consummate, and for unknown reasons actually led to decreased fertility in the women. Lieberman et. al found that childhood co-residency with an opposite-sex individual strongly predicts moral sentiments regarding third-party sibling incest, further supporting the Westermark hypothesis.
While the exact nature of kin-recognition psychology is still waiting to be defined, and to what degree it can be overcome by cultural forces is as yet poorly understood, an overwhelming body of research now shows that evolutionary biology and evolved human psychology plays a central role in human aversion to incest.
Incest versus exogamy
Anthropologists have found that marriage is governed, though often informally, by rules of exogamy, which is marriage of individuals outside their own groups, and endogamy where individuals marry inside their own group. What is considered a group, for purposes of either exogamy or endogamy, varies considerably between societies. Thus, in most stratified societies one must marry outside of one's nuclear family, a form of exogamy, but is encouraged to marry a member of one's own
class,
race, or
religion - a form of endogamy. In this example, the exogamous group is small and the endogamous group is large. But in some societies, the exogamous group and endogamous group may be of equal size. This is the case in societies divided into clans or lineages.
In most such societies, membership in a clan or lineage is inherited through only one parent. Sex with a member of one's own clan or lineage — whether a parent or a genetically very distant relative — would be considered incestuous, whereas sex with a member of another clan or lineage — including the other parent — would not be considered incest .
For example, Trobriand Islanders prohibit both sexual relations between a man and his mother, and between a woman and her father, but they describe these prohibitions in very different ways: relations between a man and his mother fall within the category of forbidden relations among members of the same clan; relations between a woman and her father do not. This is because the Trobrianders are matrilineal; children belong to the clan of their mother and not of their father. Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not. Indeed, a man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and a man and the daughter of his father's sister may prefer to have sexual relations or marry. Anthropologists have hypothesized that in these societies, the incest taboo reinforces the rule of exogamy, and thus ensures that social ties between clans or lineages will be maintained through intermarriage.
Chinese and Indian society provides an example of a society with a very broad notion of the exogamous group, as relations between two individuals with the same surname may be banned.
Some cultures cover relatives by marriage in incest prohibitions; these relationships are called affinity rather than consanguinity. For example, the question of the legality and morality of a widower who wished to marry his deceased wife's sister was the subject of long and fierce debate in the
United Kingdom in the
19th century, involving, among others,
Matthew Boulton. In medieval Europe, standing as a godparent to a child also created a bond of affinity.
The
Bible, primarily in Leviticus, contains prohibitions against sexual relations between various pairs of family members. Father and daughter, mother and son, and other pairs are forbidden on pain of death to engage in sexual relations. It prohibits sexual relations between
aunts and
nephews but not between uncles and
nieces.
Forms of Incest
Parental incest
Incest between parents and their children, including adolescents, is considered the most severe form of sexual offense by many psychologists and is a criminal offense in many nations. Parental incest includes opposite-sex and same-sex forms engaged in by fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.
Child-therapist Susan Forward calls parental incest "perhaps the cruelest, most baffling of human experiences" as it "betrays the very heart of childhood--its innocence".
Parental incest often occurs in situations where one parent is either absent from the household or emotionally or sexually unavailable. The child may act as an effective substitute for the parent's missing spouse, who may not be present to provide a check on the other parent. Recent findings by psychologists view non-consenting parent-child incest as a form of 'sexual predation'.
Child abuse attorney
Andrew Vachss calls parental incest a form of
rape of a child by the child's parent. Adults previously involved in incest are often called "secret survivors", by therapists, as there no one to listen to their shame, confusion, or self-loathing due to the topic's taboo.
It is known to therapists, that in many cases of such coercive / violent incest, the non - incestuous parent colludes with or denies the incestuous activity so that the child does not have the other parent to turn to either.
Ken Adams states that "a common myth is that overt incest is the exception not the rule in America. This is not the case." He quotes researcher Mike Lew's estimate that there are over 40 million American adults who as children were 'victims of sexual abuse', 15 million of whom were men. According to the United States' NIS-3 study of child abuse, "the sexual abuse of children has a strikingly low age transition in the distribution of incidence rates. The rate of child sexual abuse was very low for 0-2 year olds, but then relatively constant for children ages 3 and older, indicating a very wide range of vulnerability from pre-school age on."
Given the taboo nature of parent-child incest and the fact that it is engaged with dependent children, it is likely to be under-reported in official government statistics. Advocates of 'ethical, consenting' incest suggest that the very same hidden cases would reveal a less harmful reality, as personal accounts of incest and random samples of contacts that include incestuous relationships show a more positive reaction to these encounters.
One famous case is that of the poet
Anne Sexton and her daughter.
Incest by grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings in parental roles
Elder relatives can commit either overt or covert incest against children alone, or, in extreme cases, in combination with the child's incestuous parent. In cases where siblings are used by parents to parent other siblings, incest against the dependent siblings by the pseudo-parent sibling can occur. For a child, the psychological effect of incest by elder or elder-appearing relatives can resemble that of parent-child incest.
Sibling incest between children
Consensual incestuous interactions between similar-age brothers and sisters sometimes occur according to a study by Floyd Martinson who found that 10-15% of college students had childhood sexual experiences with a brother or sister, a form of child sexuality. However, where significant differences in age or capabilities occur between siblings, where elders fail to provide functional families, and/or where force or deception is used, childhood sibling incest can cause serious psychological damage to the younger or less capable sibling according to researcher Richard Niolon. Sibling incest can also damage or destroy the sibling bonds.
Author Jane Leder estimates that "23,000 women per million may have been victimized by a sibling" before age 18. Researcher Andrea Peterson notes that "This may be, at best, a conservative estimate when one considers the scarcity of data, particularly where males are the victims." In
treating abused adolescents, therapist Eliana Gil, shows how to transform incested-associated trauma in a case of
overt brother-sister incest. She failed to show how the sister committed covert incest against her brother by using him as a substitute 'father' in this fatherless family.
Adult incest
Incest between adults occurs where there is no dependence on the adults as parent-child or sibling-sibling dependence precludes independent consent. A rarely seen case of consensual incest between adult siblings is shown in the English film screened in 1994, which is based on a true story. The French film,
La Petite Lili, which was screened in 2005, shows a fictional case of incipient consensual mother-son incest between independent adults.
The
British soap opera Brookside, commonly referred to as "Brookie", was a soap opera [i] based in Liverpool [i], introduce...
ran a storyline featuring consensual incestuous sex between the two sibling characters Nat and Georgia in the 1990s.
The television series
Lost contains a semi-incestuous scene in which step-siblings Shannon and Boone sleep together.
The American film
The House of Yes, based on the play by Wendy McLeod, is about the ongoing consensual incestful relationship of a pair of twins.
The American film
Cruel Intentions is a 1999 [i] feature film [i] starring Ryan Phillippe [i], Sarah Michelle Gellar [i] ...
, and to a lesser extent, the film it is based on,
Dangerous Liaisons is a 1988 [i] film directed by Stephen Frears [i]. ...
, features a tumultuous step-sibling relationship.
The series of epic fantasy novels
Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy [i] novels [i] by American author George R.R. Martin [i] ...
by
George R.R. Martin includes, among the main characters, twins who have carried on an incestuous relationship for many years which has produced children.
The Australian Film
Bad Boy Bubby depicts an incestuous relationship between an mother and her adult son.
Sexual relations between cousins and other distant relatives
In most of the Western world incest generally refers to forbidden sexual relations within the family. However, definitions of family vary. Within the United States, marriage between cousins is illegal in some states, but not in others, and sociologists have classified marriage laws in the United States into two categories: One, used mainly in southern states, in which the definitions of incest are taken from the Bible, and which frowns upon marriage within one's lineage but less so on one's blood relatives, and another group which frowns more on marriage between blood relatives , but less on one's lineage.
Twenty-four states prohibit marriages between first cousins, and another seven permit them only under special circumstances. Utah, for example, permits first cousins to marry only provided both spouses are over age 65, or at least 55 with evidence of sterility. North Carolina permits first cousins to marry unless they are "double first cousins" . Maine permits first cousins to marry only upon presentation of a certificate of genetic counseling. The remaining nineteen states and the District of Columbia permit first-cousin marriages without restriction.
Legal in:
Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia
Illegal in:
Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming
Legal under Certain Circumstances:
Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Utah, Wisconsin
On account of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the
United States Constitution, a marriage between two cousins where it is legal generally remains valid in any state where it would be illegal. Therefore, two cousins who are legally resident in Virginia and marry there, and then move to Michigan will still be recognized as married under Michigan law. There are conflicts and courts have interpreted the clause differently.
See also: Cousin couple
Laws and mores regarding incest in industrialized societies
Degrees of criminality
The laws of many U.S. states recognize two separate degrees of incest, the more serious degree covering the closest blood relationships such as father-daughter, mother-son and brother-sister, with the less-serious charge being pressed against more distantly-related individuals who engage in sexual intercourse, usually down to and including first cousins and sometimes half cousins. In
New York State, close-blood-relation incest is a felony with a maximum penalty of four years in prison, while the less serious charge is usually only a misdemeanor. Curiously, many incest laws do not expressly proscribe sexual conduct other than vaginal intercourse — such as
oral sex — or, for that matter, any sexual activity between relatives of the same gender, so long as neither party is a minor. This legal position is in stark contrast with that in
Australia, where incest is punishable by a maximum of 25 years imprisonment for the more serious form of penetrating a
child, even if that child is over 18, and 5 years for the less serious charge of sexual penetration of a sibling or half-sibling. In Sweden it is legal to marry an adopted sibling.
Child abuse attorney
Andrew Vachss notes that there is also an incest loophole in that laws of most U.S. states that "gives privileged treatment to child rapists who grow their own victims". He writes that:
"In New York, sex with a child under the age of 11 is a Class B felony, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. The law is indexed appropriately, in the chapter on sex offenses. If, however, the sexually abused child is closely related to the perpetrator, state law provides for radically more lenient treatment . In such cases, the prosecutor may choose to charge the same acts as incest. This is not listed as a sexual offense, but instead as an 'offense affecting the marital relationship', listed next to adultery in the law books. It is a Class E felony, for which even a convicted offender may be granted probation."
Adult incest
Incestuous relations between adults, such as between an adult brother and sister, are illegal in most parts of the industrialized world. These laws are sometimes questioned on the grounds that such relations do not harm other people and so should not be criminalized. Proposals have been made from time to time to repeal these laws — for example, the proposal by the Australian Model Criminal Code Officer's Committee discussion paper "Sexual Offenses against the Person" released in November 1996.
In the wake of the
Lawrence v. Texas decision by the US Supreme Court, striking down laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy as unconstitutional, some have argued that by the same logic laws against consensual adult incest should be unconstitutional. Some civil libertarians argue that all private sexual activity between consenting adults should be legal, and its criminalization is a violation of human rights — thus, they argue that the criminalization of consensual adult incest is a violation of human rights. In Muth v. Frank, the 7th Circuit Court interpreted the case applying to homosexual activity, and refused to draw this conclusion from Lawrence, however, a decision that attracted mixed opinions.
In France, incest isn't a crime in itself. Incestuous relations between an adult and a minor are prohibited and punished by law, but not between two minors or two adults.
Effects of parent-child incest
Parental incest is known to sometimes do severe psychological harm to a child, due to the child's physical, mental, and emotional dependence on a parent, due to total disparity in the power of authority, due to the disparity in emotional and physical maturity, and finally due to the fact that the incestuous relationship may damage or destroy healthy aspects of childhood development. Child victims have been observed to go into disassociated or reclusive mental or emotional states due to shame associated with their parent's predation, which is thought to overwhelm their coping capabilities. Becoming "dead inside" is another tactic children have been observed to use in an attempt to deaden the associated pain. Suppression of emotions, as well as a halt or a severe reduction in personal growth has been observed, similar to the effects studied in the psychology of torture. Child-incest victims often suffer from what is known as
complex trauma due to developmental immaturity, due to repeated incests, and/or due to being forced to ignore the incest as a child.
In adulthood, chronic, complex, and cyclic post traumatic stress has been observed in some victims of childhood parental incest. Shame, suspicion, and unconscious alienation is thought by some psychologists to occur in the first stage of trauma transformation as the victim attempts to suppress past pain. Rage, terror, and sorrow have been observed to surface in the second stage as the victim begins to become conscious of the incest acts. In the last stage of trauma transformation, genuine self-esteem, genuine desire, and, on occasion, genuine joy have been seen in victims. These stages have been observed to take decades to complete and, in extreme cases, to cycle on until the victim's death.
Some victims of parental incest suffer severe
depression, and/or have committed
suicide, which is thought to be due to the inability to accomplish the associated trauma transformations shown above. Some victims also predate against their own children thus resulting in a legacy of incest in following generations, a form of
vicious cycle. Often, even if trauma transformation was successful, survivors have reported that due to the betrayal of innocence, the incest-associated losses, and the trauma-transformation related costs, their lives were much worse off than peers who had not suffered incest by their parents.
According to clinical psychologist Ken Adams, covert parent-child
emotional incest causes pain similar to that suffered by victims of overt incest but it is rarely identified. Covert incest is deeply harmful to children, as it denies them proper parenting, betrays their innocence, and places
pathological demands on them to deal with what are their parents obligations . Martyn Carruthers, a Canadian relationship researcher, defined the cross-generational cycles of mother-bonded men and father-bonded women that he calls "family karma".
In childhood, victims of covert incest often feel confused, privileged, and 'old' beyond their years. In adulthood, children who were victims of covert incest often feel bonded to the same opposite sex parent and anger towards the same-sex parent, and shame about those feelings, unable to comprehend how their parents have wronged them. The consequences of this parent-child bonding often continue into adulthood, perhaps for the rest of the adult child's life. As Adams says "This separation will not be given. Real emancipation cannot be given. It must be taken". Carruthers'
systemic coaching offers lasting solutions for covert emotional incest.
History
Ancient civilizations
Some experts claim that incestuous marriages were widespread at least during part of Egyptian history, such as Naphtali Lewis , who claims that numerous
papyri attest to many husbands and wives as being brother and sister. However, other scholars counter that it was common practice in Ancient Egypt for lovers to refer to themselves as brother and sister as a term of affection, not in reference to any sibling relationship. Those relationships which appear to have been genuinely incestuous primarily involved members of the royal family. Joyce Tyldesley , writing about the pre-Roman Egyptian period, states that within the royal family there was a tradition of hypergamy, where a king or his son might marry a commoner, but his daughter could not marry beneath herself, without the act being considered as degrading to herself. As a result, the royal princess often found herself either marrying her royal brother, or living her life without a spouse.
Incestuous unions were frowned upon and considered as
nefas in
Roman times, and were explicitly forbidden by an imperial edict in AD 295, which divided the concept of
incestus into two categories of unequal gravity: the
incestus iuris gentium, who was applied to both Romans and non-Romans in the Empire, and the
incestus iuris civilis which concerned only the Roman citizens. Therefore, for example, an Egyptian could marry an aunt, but a Roman could not. Despite the act of incest being unacceptable within the Roman Empire, Roman Emperor
Caligula is rumored to have had open sexual relationships with all three of his sisters, killing his favorite sister/lover when she became pregnant with his child.
Royal dynasties
Although there are reports that adult incest has been notable in many royal dynasties, the evidence usually put forward has been subjected to much criticism. There are cases of siblings marrying which are verified. A motive often given by others for this supposed custom of royal incest is that this was in order to help concentrate wealth and political influence within the family. It is noteworthy that this motive is something attributed to these dynasties, not something that they themselves put forward. Since these dynasties did not, in fact, have the norm of royal incestuous marriage, it is specious to attribute any motives to a practice which didn't actually exist. Though usually frowned upon by present-day people, incest within families of royalty or of high esteem was done because the families believed that marrying anyone who was not of their family was not worthy to marry them.
Some cultures in which royal incestuous marriage has been said to be common, are Ancient Egypt , pre-contact
Hawaii, the pre-Columbian
Mixtec and the
Inca. Ray Bixler shows that this popular view is not only without proper support but is contradicted by historical documentation. Incestuous royal marriages were found in only one Egyptian Dynasty, the
Ptolemaic dynasty. This dynasty had thirteen rulers, only one of whom resulted from an incestuous union. There were eight rulers who had a brother-sister marriage, but seven of these did not lead to a successor. Given these numbers, one cannot say that incestuous marriage was common in Ancient Egypt, nor that it was a common means of producing successors even in the one dynasty for which there is considerable evidence of incestuous marriages.
Dynasties of the modern era where there was frequent familial intermarriage were the mid-
Habsburgs; one branch ruled over
Spain and the other over
Austria. Spanish princesses, however, did marry
French kings,
Louis XIII and
Louis XIV who were not
Habsburgs . The Spanish branch died out in 1700, but the last Spanish Habsburg king,
Carlos II had been married to María-Luisa of Orléans, grand-daughter of King
Charles I of England and niece to King
Louis XIV of France: she however had a large amount of Habsburg blood via Anne and Johanna of Habsburg. In 1795 King
George IV did marry his first cousin,
Caroline of Brunswick, which evidently was an acceptable practice. However, over the last century, Kings
Philip II,
Philip III, and
Philip IV all married their Austrian cousins . The Austrian branch continued to rule until 1918, and they are still alive and prospering today. Although the ruler of Egypt,
Cleopatra, was of Greek origin, she was the daughter of her father's sister, and while reigning she married her brother, Ptolemy XIII.
In Christian society, in which most of the great royal dynasties of the early modern era functioned, incest was a terrible taboo. In 1536
Queen Anne Boleyn of England was falsely accused of incest with her brother, George Boleyn, in order to blacken her name and enable
her husband to execute her and marry
Jane Seymour.
In religious traditions
Examples of incest in mythology are rampant. In
Greek mythology Zeus and Hera are brother and sister as well as husband and wife. They were the children of
Cronus and Rhea and, according to some sources, grandchildren of
Uranus and Gaia . Cronus and Rhea's siblings, the other Titans, were also all married brothers and sisters. Poseidon also managed to produce a child by Gaia namely Antaeus.
The play
Oedipus Rex features the Ancient Greek King having an unknowing incestuous relationship with his mother.
In
Norse mythology,
Loki accuses
Freyr and
Freyja of committing incest, in
Lokasenna is one of the mythological poems of the Poetic Edda [i]. ...
. He also says that Njörðr had Freyr with his sister. This is also indicated in the
Ynglinga saga which says that incest was legal among the Vanir.
In Norse legends, the hero
Sigmund and his sister
Signy murdered her children and begat a son,
Sinfjötli. When Sinfjötli had grown up, he and Sigmund murdered Signy's husband
Siggeir. The legendary Danish king Hrólfr kraki was born from an incestuous union of
Helgi and
Yrsa.
Hinduism speaks of incest in highly abhorrent terms. Hindus were greatly fearful of the bad effects of incest and thus practice to date strict rules of both endogamy and exogamy, i.e., marriage in the same caste but not in the same family tree or bloodline .
The
Bible also contains a number of references to incest: see Biblical references to incest.
In folklore
In
Icelandic folklore a common plot involves a brother and sister conceiving a child. They subsequently escape justice by moving to a remote valley. There they proceed to have several more children. The man has some magical abilities which he uses to direct travelers to or away from the valley as he chooses. The siblings always have exactly one daughter but any number of sons. Eventually the magician allows a young man into the valley and asks him to marry the daughter and give himself and his sister a civilized burial upon their deaths. This is subsequently done.
Sibling incest forms an important part of the plot in the story of
Kullervo in the
Finnish national epic, the
Kalevala, as also in medieval versions of the
British legend of
King Arthur.
In Sri Lankan folklore, there are at least three significant instances where incest is mentioned. The forefather of the
Sinhala race, "Sinhabahu", is a king who married his own sister "Sinhaseevali". Incest is again mentioned when King Vijaya's son and daughter fled to the jungle together in protest of their father's second marriage. Also, the brother "Dantha" and the sister "Hemamalini" who brought the sacred tooth relic of Lord Buddha to the island, seemed to also have a married relationship. Despite the liberal mentioning of incest in folklore, Sri Lankan culture regards incest as a taboo. Then again, contemporary Sri Lankan culture is heavily influenced by the cultures of former colonial rulers, during last couple of centuries.
In fairy tales of Aarne-Thompson folktale type 510B, the persecuted heroine, the heroine is persecuted by her father, and most usually, the persecution is an attempt to marry her, as in
Allerleirauh or
Donkeyskin. This was taken up into the legend of Saint
Dymphna.
Several Child ballads have the motif of brother-sister incest, such as
Sheath and Knife. This is usually unwitting but always ends tragically.
Fiction
Incest is a somewhat popular topic in English erotic fiction; there are entire collections and websites devoted solely to this genre, with an entire genre of pornographic pulp fiction known as "incest novels". This is probably because, as with many other fetishes, the taboo nature of the act adds to the titillation. With the advent of the Internet, there is even more of this type of fiction available.
Besides this, incest is sometimes mentioned or described in mainstream, non-erotic fiction. Connotations can be negative, very rarely positive, or neutral. For example, in
Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel by Gabriel Garca Mrquez [i] which was first published in Spanish [i] ...
there are several cases of sex between more or less close relatives, the last of which occurs between a nephew and his aunt, resulting in the birth of a child who is born with a pig's tail and precedes the destruction of the whole town of Macondo by a
tropical cyclone. Other works of literature show consequences not so grave, such as the V.C. Andrews novel
Flowers in the Attic and its subsequent sequels, in which brother and sister uphold a loving relationship;
Arundhati Roy's
The God of Small Things is a semi-autobiographical, politically charged novel by Indian author Arundhati Roy [i] ...
, in which fraternal twins share a cathartic sexual experience; and several of
Robert A. Heinlein's later stories.
Incest is a major element of the
Sophocles play
Oedipus the King is a Greek [i] tragedy [i], written by Sophocles [i] in 428 BC [i] ...
, based on the story from
Greek mythology, in which the title character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. This act came to great prominence in the
20th century with
Freud's analysis of the Oedipus complex as lying beneath the psychology of all men. Its female counterpart is called the Electra complex.
Vladimir Nabokov's novel
deals very heavily with the incestuous relationships in the intricate family tree of the main character Van Veen. There are explicit moments of sexual relations primarily between Van and his sister Ada, as well as between Ada and her younger sister Lucette. Nabokov does not necessarily deal with any complexities or consequences, social or otherwise, which may be inherent to incestuous relationships--outside of the strictly practical concerns of having to hide the taboo relationships from others. Incest in
Ada seems mainly to be a sexual manifestation of the characters' intellectual incestuousness, and operates on a similar plane as do other instances of "sexual transgression" in Nabokov's novels of this period, such as pedophilia in
Lolita is a novel [i] by Vladimir Nabokov [i], first published in 1955 [i]. ...
and
homosexuality in
Pale Fire is a novel [i] by Vladimir Nabokov [i], his fourteenth in total and fifth in English. ...
.
In
J. R. R. Tolkien's
Silmarillion is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien [i]'s works, edited and published posthumously ...
, the characters
Túrin and Nienor enter into an incestuous marriage when they meet for the first time while Nienor is suffering from amnesia.
In two books of Philippa Gregory's Wideacre Trilogy, the central female characters Beatrice and Julia have intercourse with their brothers Harry and Richard, respectively.
Charlotte Vale Allen's book
Daddy's Girl, she narrates how the main character was viewed by her father as his lover not his daughter.
Incest plays an influential role in
George R. R. Martin's New York Times #1 bestseller fantasy series
A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy [i] novels [i] by American author George R.R. Martin [i] ...
. In the series, incest is illegal and seen as abnormal; however, children born from incestuous parents are healthy and no different from children born from non-incestuous parents, although one of them is extremely sadistic. Two of the main characters, a queen and her brother, practice incest in secret, which leads to a major war across the land when it is discovered that their children have inherited the throne. Their public denials of the incest and their secret love for each other causes a great deal of tension and conflict in the series.
In
Star Wars Luke is fascinated with his sister Leia, although he doesn't know she is his sister.
In
Richard Wagner's
Ring, the hero Siegfried is the son of the incestuous relationship between
Siegmund and
Sieglinde.
Thomas Mann's
The Holy Sinner explores the spiritual consequences of unintentional incest. His short story "The Blood of the Walsungs" also depicts brother-sister incest, drawing explicitly on Wagner's Siegmund and Sieglinde.
It also played a minor role in Stephanie Lauren's 12th Cynster novel "The Truth About Love", where the villains in the story were the Fritham siblings, Jordan and Eleanor, who often trysted in Hellabore Hall's Garden of Night. They murdered the heroine's mother Miribelle, purely because she heard and witnessed them in the Garden of Night , and thus tried to prevent her daughter Jacqueline from ever consorting with the Fritham siblings again, creating a huge problem for Jordan, who had plotted to gain Hellabore Hall through a marriage with Jacqueline.
The 1994 film Spanking the Monkey depicts a situation in which mother-son incest takes place, leading to the suicide attempt of the latter. Another example is
The House of Yes, a late 90s film where incest again leads to tragedy. A depiction of an incestuous world in
science fiction can be found in
Theodore Sturgeon's story "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?".
The hit television series
Prison Break shows the character T-Bag as a spawn of his father and aunt.
It is also a main plot device in the movie
Caligula,
Park Chan-Wook's
Oldboy is a 2003 [i] South Korean [i] film [i] directed by Park Chan-wook [i] ...
, Roman Polanski's
Chinatown and
Guy Maddin's film Careful.
In the finale episode of season 3 from
FX Network's television drama
Nip/Tuck, the characters of
Quentin Costa and
Kit McGraw are exposed as incestuous lovers, of likewise incestuous parents. This discovery comes soon after Quentin is unmasked as the serial killer The Carver, the main antagonist of season 3, along with his accomplice, Kit.
Incest has also been a recurring subject in Japanese
anime, dating all the way back to one of the medium's earliest pornographic titles,
Cream Lemon. Certain anime programs, such as
Koi Kaze is a five-volume Japan [i]ese manga [i] that was adapted as a 13-episode anime [i] televisi ...
, are serious studies of the characters as they struggle with their emotions and societal taboos, while others, such as
Revolutionary Girl Utena, use incest mainly for shock value and titillation. In the anime
Ouran High School Host Club, Hikaru and Kaoru Hitachiin, twin boys, often imply incest, though it's to tease others. Other notable anime and manga series that include incest are
Angel Sanctuary,
Onegai Twins, and
Paranoia Agent.
The 2004 motion picture
Eurotrip has an explicit scene in which inebriated siblings Jamie and Jenny French kiss. This is then used as a plot device to reveal the siblings' revulsion at their behavior.
In the episode Rosewell of the animated series
Futurama, the crew is sent back in time to the 1940's while watching a Supernova occur. Without any guidance systems available at that time, their ship crash lands at Roswell, where Fry meets his Grandfather, Enis. Fry is then warned by the Professor not to interfere with anything in case he disrupts his own timeline. But in an attempt to prevent his grandfather's death, he locks him in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere - which is unbeknownst to him a nuclear test zone . Soon afterwards he quickly becomes entangled in his young grandmother's emotional despair and ends up sleeping with her. The Professor, after discovering the two, then informs Fry that he is his own grandfather.
In the realms of fandom and fanfiction, many fans speculate that there is incestuous subtext between two related characters; however, these theories are not necessarily seen as canon and are often denied or unconfirmed by the original creator. Examples of characters fans enjoy creating incestuous fan fiction around are,
Edward and
Alphonse Elric from
Fullmetal Alchemist,
Fred and George Weasley from
Harry Potter books are an immensely popular series of fantasy novel [i]s by British [i]...
and
Sam Winchester and
Dean Winchester from TV Show
Supernatural.
In the Japanese
manga Loveless, Seimei has strong incestuous feelings for his younger brother, at times bordering on sexual. Their relationship is also vital to the story, and the main motives behind the events that take place.
In
Back to the Future 
