Was marriage originally a religious institution or did it just begin to take on religious aspects over time?
I think it was originally a religious institution. Just about every Christian wedding ceremony you will ever attend will mention Adam & Eve’s “marriage.”
Genesis 2:20-24 (New International Version; Thompson, ed. 1975)
My WAG is that, in Christian society at least, a marriage is, at least superficially, a declaration of the couple’s intent to live as one before God, based on Adam & Eve’s model. Or at least that’s how it’s been understood throughout the years; obviously not every couple getting married in culturally Christian societies are believers.
One thing to recall is that the vast majority of societies of which we know were inherently religious in nature. The notion of a secular state (while not new to us) appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of humanity.
The Romans had clearly civil marriages and I am not sure of the status of marriage in China, but in most places, marriage was bound up with religion, but then everything was bound up with religion. In many societies, the ruler had a special role in religious ceremonies (even when the ruler was not considered divine).
Laws regarding marriage tended to be set up to define property and inheritance rather than establishing “divine blessing” on those who married, but I am not aware of any society that did not have words for marriage, husband, wife, etc., often couched in religious terms. If nothing else, the issue of fertility invoked religious fervor in most societies.
Someone with more knowledge (and cites) should follow up on this, but as tom~ mentions, the situation in the civilizations that became Christian tended to be that it was an arrangement for passing on the properties of the two families, subject to a blessing from the religious side. But so was everything: You could not go to war w/o first consulting the entrails of chickens and making the appropriate sacrifices, you could not take public office w/o an annointing by a high priest, you could not plant your crops, set out on the hunt, start a building, etc. w/o somehow making it agreeable to Heaven. Impiety was itself an offense in the ancient Roman and Greek republics at various points in history.
However, as to it originating in religion, that’s a bit trickier. The idea that we’d ALL be one great big Free Love party but for only religion coming in to harsh our groove, has always seemed to me as not self-evident. If anything, I’d think that once societies grew to the point where you could (a) make a significant distinction between private-personal, private-familial, common-to-all and common-but-controlled wealth and (b) speak of rights, ranks and duties held by birthright, there would arise a great pressure to create some sort of organized institution to standardize a presumption of who’s whose father/child, who is entitled to whose goods/rank, who is obligated to feed-house-protect whom, and what family-groups have mutual obligations to each other. One that would involve establishing an exclusivity for at least some of the parties, for at least some of the time. If in such cases it has also been observed that stable family units produced more or healthier children, that would be taken as a sign of divine favor for that sort of arrangement. Throw in a couple of self-reinforcing cycles and you got yourself a society that has marriage, and whose religion preaches it’s Heaven’s mandate.
While the Romans had a kind of commonlaw marriage, where a man and a woman living together were considered married, Roman official civil marriages did have religious overtones. The Romans didn’t have civil, non religious marriages the way we understand them today.
Given that pair bonding appears frequently in the animal kingdom and, outside of humans, none of them seem to have a religion, it is quite clear that pair bonding existed millions of years before the development of religion. Converting “pair bonding” into “marriage” is just linguistics and legalese.
Once marriage ceases to mean a continuing choice to stay together and become a commitment to stay together which has some moral force, then I think in most societies it becomes as inherently religious as any other public vow or commitment. I agree with Tomndebb; I think the notioin of a vow that is morally binding but has no religious signfiicance whatsoever is a modern concept.
My semi-WAG is that marriage 10BPE was basically a form of slavery. The woman was sold to the man by the woman’s family. The holdover to this is a dowery.
I.e., for a large part of the existence of Homo Sapiens it was a financial transaction. “I’ll give you 3 cows for your daughter.”
How can you make that sound religious?
Note, there is this really weird belief many people have that moral behavior can only exist in the realm of a religion (and their religion in particular). Let’s face it, if Alley Oop steals Fred Flinstone’s deer skin, Fred’s gonna smash Alley Oop over the head with his stone axe asap. Hardly a situation where the opinion of gods is needed.