Social Origins and Primal Law

But really pristine man and woman can have had no houses, no matriarchal rule of women. The Nairs, not being primitive, have houses, and their women have authority: pristine man was not in their condition. However, captured alien wives would, Mr. McLennan argues, be property, be slaves; and men would find this arrangement (now obsolete) so charming that polyandry and the reign of woman would go out. The only real legal marriage would be wedlock with an alien, a captive, a slave woman. Marriage with a woman of the same stock would be a crime and a sin. It would be incest.44 Really it would be, at worst, concubinage.

This theory seems untenable at every point, community of wives, female infanticide, household life, supremacy of women in the household, living with a non-captive wife reckoning as incest, and, in short, all along the line. Even if the prejudice against marrying native women did exist, it could not be developed into the idea of sin – granting that the idea of sin already existed. To be sinful, endogamy within the group must have offended some superstitious belief, perhaps the belief in the totem, with its tabu.45

MR. CRAWLEY'S THEORY

To disengage from his learned book, The Mystic Rose (1902), Mr. Crawley's theory of the origin of exogamy is no easy task. He strongly insists on the 'religious' element in all early human thought, and as in 'religion' he includes the vague fears, misgivings, and ideas of 'luck,' which haunt even the least religious of modern men, we may say that 'religion,' in this sense, mingles with the thought of all ages. The present writer, like Dr. Johnson, is an example of the 'religious' character, and of Mr. Crawley's remark that 'human nature remains potentially primitive.' To the 'religious' man or woman (using 'religious' in this sense) the universe is indeed a thing of delicate poise, and may 'break, and bring down death,' if we walk under a ladder, or spill the salt, or enter a doorway with the wrong foot foremost, or fail to salute a magpie, or the new moon. The superstitious anthropologist, of course, knows that all these apprehensions of his are utterly absurd, but the savage is careful and troubled about them. The Philistine, on the other hand, is proud of his conquest of these airy terrors: he 'cannot imagine what people mean by such nonsense,' and, exactly so far as he is sincere, he cannot comprehend early mankind.

Now, as to exogamy, our difficulty is to understand why breach of the rule against certain marriages is, everywhere, so deadly a sin: so black an offence against 'religion.' Mr. Crawley's explanation is not, perhaps, easily to be disengaged from the mass of his work, but it begins in his appreciation of the δεισιδαιμονία of early men, their ever-present sense of 'religious' terrors. 'Thus all persons are potentially dangerous to others, as well as potentially in danger…'46 This sense of peril arises 'in virtue simply of the distinction between a man and his fellows.' Much more, then, are women dangerous to men, and men to women, the sexes being so distinct from each other. We know that the most extraordinary precautions are taken to avoid contact with women in certain circumstances, and a well-known story of Sir John Mandeville's is only one case of the fact that the bridegrooms of some races, from a superstitious terror, insist on being made cocus en herbe. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen give the instance of 'the marriage ceremony' (an odious brutality) among the Arunta of Central Australia.47 It is perhaps intended to deliver the bridegroom from a peril imagined by superstition (as in Mandeville's tale);48 and, without it, the Australian would resemble the man derided in the old Scottish song:

The Bridegroom grat when the sun gaed doon.

Thus a 'religious' dread attaches among savages (the theory holds) to all marriages; all are novelties, new steps in life, and therefore are so far 'sinful' that they involve a peril, vague but awful, the creation of superstition. Marriages contrary to the exogamous rule, are only especially and inexplicably bad cases of the 'sin' – that is, mystic danger – of marital relations in general, as I understand Mr. Crawley. Marriage ceremonies of every kind are devised to avoid 'sin,' as our Marriage Service candidly states, using 'sin' in the Christian sense of the word. But there are savage marriages, those forbidden by the law of exogamy, which, as a general rule, no ceremony can render other than sinful. So great and terrible is the danger of such marriages – namely, among many savages, between persons of the same totem, that it threatens the whole community, just as the marriage of Charles I. with a Catholic bride caused the Plague, according to the Rev. Mr. Row, and therefore such unions are punished by the death penalty, and are but seldom left to the automatic vengeance of the tabu. Foremost in this black list of sins are the unions of brothers and sisters of the full blood, though, we must remember, these are not more heavily punished than marriage between a man and woman of the same totem, even if the pair come together from opposite ends of the continent, and are not blood relations at all. Why is this?

As I understand Mr. Crawley, the sexes, in savagery, avoid each other's society in everyday life, partly from 'sexual tabu' – the result of the superstitions already indicated; partly because of 'sexual solidarity,' perhaps even of 'sexual antipathy.' In fact, men and women are often very much in each other's way. We do not want women in our clubs and smoking-rooms – nor do savages – and we despise a man who lurks in drawing-rooms when his fellows are out of doors; a man who is a pillar of luncheon parties and of afternoon tea. But this separation of the sexes is especially rigid between the children of the same hearth, even among nomads. The boys go with the father, the girls with the mother. The manlike apes have the same ideas. 'Diard was told by the Malays, and he found it afterwards to be true, that the young Siamangs, when in their helpless state, are carried about by their parents, the males by the father, the females by the mother.' 'The nests … are only occupied by the female and young, the male passing the night in a fork of the same tree or another tree in the vicinity.'49

These facts of ape etiquette would, to use an Elizabethan phrase, have been 'nuts' to Mr. Atkinson, and prove that sexual separation of the children is a very early institution. In Australia, New Caledonia, and other countries, brothers and sisters must not even speak to each other, and must avoid each other utterly. Thus the danger and 'sin' of the most innocent intercourse between brothers and sisters is emphasised; much more awful, then, are matrimonial unions of brother and sister. 'The extension' (of this idea) 'by the use of relationships produces the various forms of exogamy,' says Mr. Crawley.50 There are difficulties here; for example, Mr. Crawley tells us that incest did not 'need prevention,' though the rules of brother-and-sister avoidance seem really to mean that it did, or was thought to do so (but perhaps only superstitious dread of ordinary intercourse caused the rule?), and though we know of regions where such incest, in early youth, is said to be universal.51 'Such incest,' says Mr. Crawley, 'is prevented by the psychological difficulty with which love comes into play between persons either closely associated, or strictly separated before the age of puberty…'52 Now we know that lust does come into play – for example, among the Annamese – between brothers and sisters not closely separated; and we also know that, the more persons are 'strictly separated,' the more does the novelty and romance, when they do meet, produce natural attraction, as between Romeo and Juliet. Incest among the young is really prevented by the religious horror with which, by most peoples, it is regarded; as well as, among the civilised, by the constant and sacred familiarity of family life. The bare idea of it can only occur, as a desirable notion, to a boyish revolutionary, like Shelley, or to minds congenitally depraved.

Again, men and women of the same totem have no 'avoidances' forced upon them, as far as I know (and, as they may not marry, this is an oversight); yet their marriages are as terribly sinful as marriages between brother and sister of the full blood. Mr. Crawley writes, 'Obviously the one invariable antecedent in all exogamous systems, indeed in all marriage systems, is the prohibition of marriage "within the house."' But, we reply, A (a male) and B (a female), of the same totem, may never have been in the same house, or in the same degree of latitude and longitude, before they met and fell in love. As to 'house,' houses they may have none. Yet their union is a deadly sin. Mr. Robertson Smith is said to have 'set the question in the right direction,' when he wrote, 'whatever is the origin of bars to marriage, they certainly are early associated with the feeling that it is indecent for house-mates to intermarry.'53

But what is early need not be primary.

Again, if Mr. Crawley reads on, he will find, I think, that the context of Mr. Robertson Smith's argument shows him not to have held that exogamy arose in 'the feeling that it is indecent for "house-mates"' (or tent-mates) 'to marry.' For Mr. Robertson Smith adds, 'it will not do to turn this argument round, and say that the pre-Islamic law of bars to marriage may have arisen … in virtue of a custom that every wife and her children shall have their own tent.[50] In any case, we cannot speak of 'house-mates' before there were houses. But if for 'house-mates' we read 'hearth-mates,' then no sense of 'indecency,' as on Mr. Crawley's theory, need necessarily attend their marriage, for hearth-mates may be of different totems, derived from different mothers, and may be marriageable enough, at least as far as totem law is concerned. A, male, an Emu, marries B, a Bandicoot, and C, a Grub. His children by B have the Bandicoot totem, his children by C have the Grub totem. As far as totem law goes, these children may intermarry, but this is not allowed in practice to-day. Mr. Mathews says, of the Kamilaroi, 'in order to prevent such a close marriage' (of brother and sister on the father's side), 'every tribe has strict social customs, founded upon public opinion, which will not tolerate the union of a man with a woman whose blood relationship is considered too near.'54 Australian ethics, long trained under the old totem and phratry prohibitions, are now sufficiently enlightened to reject unions which we also forbid. But it cannot have been so in the beginning, or the totem and phratry tabus on marriage would have had no occasion to exist. It would have sufficed to say, 'Thou shalt not marry thy sister, or mother,' and the totemic rule would have been a cumbrous superfluity. Superfluous it would have been, even under the hypothetical 'group marriage system,' where the law would have run 'Thou shalt not marry thy group-sister or group-mother.'

While Mr. Matthews gives a kind of bye-law, forbidding marriage, under female descent, with the paternal half-sister, Mr. Fison avers that the Kamilaroi do allow such unions. 'It is marriage within a phratria,' but not within a totem.55 The fact was denied, or at least questioned, by many correspondents, but Mr. Fison believed it to be authentic. 'The natives justified it on the ground that the parties were not of the same mudji' (totem). Apparently these natives, who let a man marry his father's daughter, had not arrived at an objection to unions of 'too near flesh.' But mere decadence, under European whisky, may be the explanation. Mr. Matthews denies, as we saw, what Mr. Fison asserts, as to the Kamilaroi. Mr. Crawley writes, 'if we apply to the word "indecent" the connotation of sexual tabu … and if we understand by "house-mates" those upon whom sexual tabu concentrates, we have explained exogamy.'56

Scarcely, for sexual tabu against marriage, in fact, now, at least, concentrates on people of near kin, and on totem-mates, man and woman of the same totem, and they may be 'house-mates,' or 'hearth-mates,' or they may not (in polygamous society), and the hearth-mates (as far as the totem rule goes, but not now in practice) may thus be intermarriageable, as not of the same totem, while totem-mates, from opposite ends of a continent, are not intermarriageable (except in the peculiar case of the Arunta and cognate tribes).

But Mr. Crawley may reply that each totem, originally, did really pertain to all members of each small local group, and that the totem prohibition was extended, later, to all groups of the same totem name, however distant in space. Thus according to the Euahlayi blacks there were originally no totem names, but the divine Baiame gave them to mortals with the rule that no pair of the same totem name were to marry, 'however far apart their hunting grounds.' Thus considered, the tabu which forbids an Emu man to marry an Emu woman, would mean no more, originally, than that marriage between persons living in the close contiguity of the same local group (in this case the Emu group) was forbidden. There might be no original intention of prohibiting marriage with a person of an Emu group, dwelling a thousand miles away; probably no such group was known to exist. The original meaning of exogamous law, I repeat, would be merely 'you must not marry a hearth-mate,' – or a 'house-mate,' in Mr. Crawley's phrase – the hearth-mates, in this particular instance, being delimited by the name 'Emu.' So far my conjecture agrees with that of Mr. Crawley. The extension of the prohibition to persons of the same totem-name, however remote their homes and alien their blood, I am content to regard as a later kind of accidental corollary. There came to be totem kins of the same name, far remote, and thus, as it were casually, the law acquired an unpremeditated sweep and scope, including persons not really of the same group or blood, only of the same name.

But why was there originally any objection at all to marrying the most accessible bride, the female hearth-mate? Here, as I have tried to show, Mr. Crawley would explain by his idea of sexual tabu. All men are regarded with superstitious dread by all women, and vice versa; above all, as a daily danger, the men, or women living in close contiguity must avoid each other. To keep them apart all sorts of tabus and avoidances are invented, including the tabu on their marriage.

This is a plausible and taking theory, and I am far from arguing that it cannot be a true theory. But the insuperable difficulty of deciding arises from the circumstance that we know nothing at all about the intellectual condition of the more or less human beings among whom the prohibition of marriage within the group first arose. Were they advanced enough to be capable of such a superstitious dread of each other as the supposed cause of the prohibition takes for granted? Males and females, among the lower animals, have no such superstition. It requires human imagination. On the other hand, animal jealousy was well within their reach, and Mr. Atkinson derives the original prohibition of marriage within the group from the sheer sexual jealousy of the animal-patriarch. In his opinion the consequent aversion to such wedlock crystallised into a habit, as the race advanced towards full humanity.

Even before his anthropoid clients were completely human, the group would be replete with children of females not of the full group blood, captives, and therefore these children (if blood kin through females were regarded) would be eligible as wives. But this would not yet, of course, be understood. Perhaps it would not be fully understood till the totem name was given to, and accepted by, each group, and so there was a definite mark set on each woman brought in from without the group, and on her children, who bore her totem name. After that, each totem group obviously contained members of other totems, and those, being now recognised by their mother's totem names, were technically intermarriageable. What had been a group not explicitly conscious of its own heterogeneous elements, became, in fact, an assemblage of recognised heterogeneousness, capable of finding legal brides within itself, and no longer under the necessity (had it understood) of capturing brides from without in hostile fashion. Such an assemblage would, or might, come to consist of families, dwelling, or rather wandering, within a given region, all on terms of friendship and mutual aid. I take it that, by this time, improved weapons and instruments, and improved skill, enabled groups larger than the small original groups to live in a given area. In fact, the group would, or might, be a small local 'tribe,' but, probably, was unconscious of the circumstance. If conscious, one cause of hostility among the groups was at an end, there was no necessity for stealing women, a system of peaceful betrothals within the group might now arise, though certain facts, to be dealt with later, raise a presumption, perhaps, that this relatively peaceful state of life did not appear until two of the original local totem groups coalesced in connubium, intermarrying with each other, in fact becoming 'phratries.'

To produce the new condition of affairs, two factors were necessary: first, a means of distinguishing the captured women within every group from each other, and from the group into which they were brought by capture. This means of distinction was afforded by the totem names. Next, a recognition of kinship was needed, and this was supplied, let us conjecture, by naming the children of each of the captive women after the totem name of the group from which she was captured. If all the children indiscriminately were called by the totem name (say Emu) of the local group into which their mothers had been brought – that is, by the totem name of their fathers – there would be no recognisable heterogeneity within that group, and so there would be, within the local group, no possible wives, under the exogamous rule. Whether polyandry then existed, or not, still all the fathers were of one local totem name, say Emu, and children could only be differentiated by styling them after the totem names of their alien mothers. This is usually done among the savages who are least advanced, but not among the Arunta, whose totem names, as we shall see, by a curious divergence, do not indicate stock, but are derived from a singular superstition about ancestral spirits, of various totems, incarnating themselves in each new-born child.

Mr. McLennan, in Primitive Marriage (1865), had arrived at conclusions very like these. The primitive groups 'were assumed to be homogeneous… While as yet there was no system of kinship, the presence of captive women in a horde' (group), 'in whatever numbers, could not introduce a system of betrothals' – the women and their children not yet being differentiated from each other, and from the group in which they lived. Mr. McLennan, in 1865, did not ask how these women ever came to be distinctly differentiated, each from each, and from the group which held them, though that differentiation was a necessary prelude to the recognition of kindred through these women. But presently, in his Studies of Totemism (1869), he found, whether he observed the fact or not, the means of differentiation. Differentiation became possible after, and not before, each primitive group received a totem name, retained by its captive women within each group to which they were carried, a name to be inherited by their children in each case.

He says, 'heterogeneity as a statical force can only have come into play when a system of kinship led the hordes to look on the children of their foreign women as belonging to the stocks of their mothers.' That was impossible, before the totem or some equivalent system of naming foreign groups arose, a circumstance not easily observed till Mr. McLennan himself opened the way to the study of Totemism.57

It thus appears that Mr. Crawley's theory of exogamy and mine are practically identical in essence (if I rightly interpret him). The original objection was to the intermarriage of the young of the group of contiguity, the hearth-mates. If there was but one male of the elder generation in the group of contiguity, these young people would be brothers and sisters. If there were two or more males of the elder generation, brothers, the group would include cousins, who (even before the totem name was accepted by the group) would also be forbidden to intermarry. When the totem name was accepted, cousins, children of brother and sister, and even brothers and sisters, children of one father, by. wives of different totems, would be, technically, intermarriageable: though their marriages may, in practice, have been forbidden because they were still of the group of contiguity, and as such bore its local totem name, say, Emu, while, by the mother's totem name, they may have been Bats, or Cats, or anything. Where I must differ from Mr. Crawley is in doubting whether at this hypothetical early stage, the superstitions which produce 'sexual tabu' had arisen. We cannot tell; but certainly, as soon as the totem name had given rise to the myth that the totem, in human beings as in animals and plants, was inviolable – the beast or plant of the totem blood not to be killed or eaten,58 the woman of the totem name not to be touched – so soon would endogamy, marriage within the totem, be a sin, incest. This it would be; the totem tabu once established, whether sexual tabu, or sexual jealousy, or both, caused the first prohibition, not to marry group, mates. Here we may briefly advert to Dr. Westermarck's theory of exogamy, though it interrupts the harmonious issue of our speculations.

DR. WESTERMARCK'S THEORY

As to exogamy, Dr. Westermarck explains it by 'an instinct' against marriage of near kin. Our ancestors who married near kin would die out, he thinks, and they who avoided such unions would survive, 'and thus an instinct would be developed,'59 by 'Natural Selection.' But why did any of our ancestors avoid such marriages at all? From 'an aversion to those with whom they lived.' And why had they this aversion? Because they had an instinct against such unions. Then why had they an instinct? We are engaged in a vicious circle. 'Lastly it is not scientific to use the term instinct of this kind of thing.'60

MR. MORGAN'S THEORY

As to Mr. Morgan's theory, in his Ancient Society (1877), of a movement of sanitary and moral reform, which led to prohibition of 'consanguine marriages' I shall return to it in a later part of this essay ('Other Bars to Marriage'). Here it will be found that Mr. Morgan is the source of certain other theories which we are to discuss, a fact involving a certain amount of repetition of arguments already advanced.

RETURN TO THE AUTHOR'S THEORY

We conclude, provisionally, that exogamy, for various reasons of sexual jealousy, and perhaps of sexual superstition, and of sexual indifference to persons familiar from infancy, may, at least, have tended to arise while each little human group was anonymous; before the acceptance of totem names by local groups. But this exogamous tendency, if it existed, must have been immensely reinforced and sweepingly defined when the hitherto anonymous groups, coming to be known by totem names, evolved the totem superstitions and tabus. Under these, I suggest, exogamy became fully developed. Marriage was forbidden, amours were forbidden (there are exceptional cases), within the totem name. This law barred, of course, marital relations between son and mother, between brother and sister, but, just as it stood, permitted incest between father and daughter, so long as the totem name was inherited from the mother. But that form of incest, in turn, came to be barred by another set of savage rules, which, whatever their origin, prohibit marriage within the generation. That set of rules, noted specially in Australia and North America, is part of what is usually styled 'The Class System.'

CHAPTER II

THE CLASS SYSTEM

Under this name appear to be blended, (1) the prohibition to marry within a division, which, in its simplest form, is said to cut the tribe into two 'classes' or 'phratries,' or 'groups;'61 (2) the prohibition to marry within the totem name; (3) the prohibition to marry within the generation, and within certain recognised degrees ('classes,' 'sections') of real or inferred kinship – 'too near flesh,' too close consanguinity, which, in their present condition, many Australian tribes undoubtedly regard as a bar to matrimony. But it does not follow that they originally held this opinion.