Oath
While some versions are quite long—one source depicts a ceremony with six stanzas—the best-known points are:
"You must not eat brown bread while you can get white, except you like the brown the best. You must not drink small beer while you can get strong, except you like the small the best. You must not kiss the maid while you can kiss the mistress, except you like the maid the best, but sooner than lose a good chance you may kiss them both."The exception clauses make clear that the oath is not an oath at all; one may do as one pleases. Other parts of the oath include pledges to be kind to one's wife, to remember that the man is the head of his household, and to bring new initiates on one's next visit.
Read more about this topic: Swearing On The Horns
Famous quotes containing the word oath:
“Here I swear, and as I break my oath may ... eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge.... Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again—I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“I’ll have my bond, speak not against my bond,
I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)