Milk Kinship - Practice in Eastern Christianity

Practice in Eastern Christianity

Weisner-Hanks mentions the introduction in the fifteenth century of prohibitions in the Christian Canon Law, in which one is not allowed to marry any one suspected to be of respective kin. Individuals who shared godparents, and great grandparents were prohibited against marrying. The prohibitions against marriage also extended to that of natural godparents. This was because both natural and ‘foster’ or ‘spiritual’ parents had an investment on the child’s spiritual well being, which would not be achieved by going against Canon Law. The practice of milk kinship is paralleled quite frequently, among scholarly works, with that of Christian godparent-hood or spiritual kinship. Parkes states that in both milk kinship and god-or co-parenthood “we deal with a fictitious kinship relationship between people of unequal status that is embedded in a long-term exchange of goods and services that we know as patronage”. Iranians seemed to have “taken care to confine delegated suckling to subordinate non-kin-particularly those with whom marriage would be undesirable in any event”. Marriage taboos due to milk kinship were taken very seriously since some regarded breast milk to be refined female blood from the womb, thus conveying a ‘uterine substance’ of kinship. Children who were milk kin to each other were prohibited to marry as well as two children from different parents who were suckled by the same woman. It was as much of a taboo to marry your milk-brother or -sister, as it was to marry a biological brother or sister. It is extremely important to understand that in all cases “What is forbidden by blood kinship is equally forbidden by milk kinship”.