Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)

THE SECRET OF THE TOTEM

BY

ANDREW LANG

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

NEW YORK AND BOMBAY

1905

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

      I. ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM
     II. METHOD OF INQUIRY
    III. THEORY OF PRIMAL PROMISCUITY
     IV. THE ARUNTA ANOMALY
      V. THE THEORIES OF DR. DURKHEIM
     VI. THE AUTHOR'S THEORY
    VII. RISE OF PHRATRIES AND TOTEM KINS
   VIII. A NEW POINT EXPLAINED
     IX. TOTEMIC REDISTRIBUTION
      X. MATRIMONIAL CLASSES
     XI. MR. FRAZER'S THEORY OF TOTEMISM

APPENDIX: AMERICAN THEORIES

INTRODUCTION

This book is the natural sequel of _Social Origins and Primal Law_,
published three years ago. In _Primal Law_, Mr. J. J. Atkinson sought
for the origin of marriage prohibitions in the social conditions of
early man, as conceived of by Mr. Darwin. Man, in the opinion of the
great naturalist, was a jealous animal; the sire, in each group,
kept all his female mates to himself, expelling his adolescent male
offspring. From this earliest and very drastic restriction, Mr.
Atkinson, using the evidence of "avoidances" between kinsfolk in
savage society, deduced the various prohibitions on sexual unions. His
ingenious theory has been received with some favour, where it has been
understood.

Mr. Atkinson said little about totemism, and, in _Social Origins_,
I offered a theory of the Origin of Totemism; an elaboration of the
oldest of all scientific theories, that of Garcilasso de la Vega, an
Inca on the maternal side, the author of the _History of the Incas_.
Totems, he conceived, arose in the early efforts of human groups to
differentiate each from the others. Mr. Max Müller and Dr. Pikler
set forth the same notion, independently. The "clans," or, as I
say, "groups," needed differentiation by names, such as are still
used as personal names by savages, and by names easily expressed in
pictographs, and easily signalled in gesture language. The origin of
the group names, or sobriquets, once forgotten, the names, as usual,
suggested a relation between the various name-giving objects and the
groups which bore them. That relation was explained by the various
myths which make the name-giving animals, plants, and other objects,
mystic kinsmen, patrons, or ancestors of the groups named after them.
From reflection on this mystic _rapport_ between the objects and the
human groups of the same names, arose the various superstitions and
tabus, including that which prohibits unions between men and women of
the same animal group-name, whether by locality or maternal descent.

Critics objected that such a "trivial accident" as a name could not be
the germ, or one of the germs of a great social system. But "the name
goes before everything," as the Scots used to say; and in this book I
have set forth the great importance of names in early society, a fact
universally acknowledged by anthropologists.

It was also objected that names given from without would never be
accepted and gloried in, so I now prove that such names have often been
accepted and gloried in, even when they are derisive; which, among
savages, names derived from plants and animals are not; they are rather
honourable appellations.

So far, I have only fortified my position. But some acute criticisms
offered in _Man_ by Mr. N. W. Thomas enabled me to detect a weak point
in my system, as given in _Social Origins_, and so led on to what I
venture to think not unimportant discoveries regarding the Australian
social organisations. To Mr. Thomas's researches, which I trust he will
publish in full, I am much indebted, and he kindly read part of this
book in type-written MS.

I also owe much to Mrs. Langloh Parker, who generously permitted me to
read, in her MS., her valuable account of the Euahlayi tribe of New
South Wales, which is to be published by Messrs. Archibald Constable.
No student has been so intimately acquainted as this lady with the
women of an Australian tribe; while the men, in a place where they
could be certain that they were free from tribal _espionnage_, were
singularly communicative. Within its limits, Mrs. Langloh Parker's
book, I think, may be reckoned almost as valuable as those of Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen.

By the irony of fortune, I had no sooner seen my book in print, than
Mr. J. G. Frazer's chapter on "The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism
among the Australian Aborigines" (_Fortnightly Review_, September 1905)
came into my hands. I then discovered that, just when I thought myself
to have disentangled the ravelled thread of totemism, Mr. Frazer also
thought, using another metaphor, that his own "plummets had found
bottom"--a very different bottom. I then wrote Chapter XI., stating my
objections to his theories. Many of these, mainly objections to the
hypothesis of the relative primitiveness of the Arunta "nation," had
often been urged before by others. I was unaware that they had been
answered, but they have obviously been deemed inadequate. Meanwhile the
question as between two entirely different solutions of the old mystery
remains open.

Since critics of my _Social Origins_ often missed my meaning, I am
forced to suppose that I may in like manner have misconstrued some of
the opinions of others, which, as I understand them, I am obliged to
contest. I have done my best to understand, and shall deeply regret
any failures of interpretation on my own part.

Necessarily I was unaware that in Mr. Frazer's opinion, as set forth in
his essay of September 1905, "the common assumption that inheritance
of the totem through the mother always preceded inheritance of it
through the father need not hold good." I have throughout argued on
that assumption, which I understood to be held by Mr. Frazer, as well
as by Mr. Taylor, Mr. Howitt, and most authorities. If it be correct,
as I still think it is, it cannot but be fatal to the Arunta claim to
primitiveness. But Arunta society is, in many points, so obviously
highly organised, and so confessedly advanced, that I am quite unable
to accept this tribe as an example of the most archaic state of affairs
extant. If I am wrong, much of my argument is shaken, and of this it
is necessary to warn the reader. But a tribe really must be highly
advanced in organisation, if it can afford to meet and devote four
months to ceremonials, as it did, in a region said to be relatively
deficient in natural supplies.

In this book I have been able to use the copious materials of Mr.
Howitt and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen in their two recent works. It
seems arrogant to differ from some of the speculative opinions of these
distinguished observers, but "we must go where the logos leads us."

I end by thanking Mr. H. J. Ford for his design of Eagle Hawk and Crow,
heading the totems in their phratries, and betrothing two interesting
young human members of these divisions.

THE SECRET OF THE TOTEM

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM

      The making of the local tribe of savagery--Earliest known
      stage of society--Result of complex processes--Elaborate
      tribal rules--Laws altered deliberately: sometimes
      borrowed--Existing legislative methods of savages not
      primitive--The tribe a gradual conquest of culture--The
      tribe a combination of small pre-tribal kinships--History
      of progress towards the tribe traceable in surviving
      institutions--From passion to Law--Rudeness of native
      culture in Australia--Varieties of social organisation
      there--I. Tribes with two phratries, totems, female
      descent--Tribes of this organisation differ as to
      ceremonies and beliefs--Some beliefs tend to polytheism:
      others towards monotheism--Some tribes of pristine
      organisation have totemic magic and _pirrauru_: others
      have not--The more northern tribes of pristine
      organisation share the ceremonies and beliefs of central
      tribes: not so the south-eastern tribes--Second form (a)
      of social organisation has male descent--Second form (b)
      has female descent _plus_ "matrimonial classes"--Account
      of these--Eight-class system--The Arunta nation--Their
      peculiar form of belief in reincarnation--_Churinga
      nanja_--Recapitulation--The Euahlayi tribe.

The question of the origin of totemism has more than the merely curious
or antiquarian interest of an historic or prehistoric mystery. In
the course of the inquiry we may be able to discern and discriminate
the relative contributions of unreflecting passion, on one hand, and
of deliberate reason, on the other, to the structure of the earliest
extant form of human society. That form is the savage local tribe, as
known to us in America and in Australia.

Men live in united local communities, relatively large, and carefully
regimented, before they have learned to domesticate animals, or to obey
chiefs, or to practise the rudest form of agriculture, or to fashion
clay into pottery, or to build permanent hovels. Customary law is older
than any of these things, and the most ancient law which we can observe
unites a tribe by that system of marriages which expresses itself in
totemism.

It is plain that the processes of evolution which have resulted in
the most backward societies known to us, must have been very complex.
If we reflect that the society of the Australian aborigines presents
the institution of local tribes, each living peacefully, except for
occasional internal squabbles, in a large definite tract of country;
cultivating, on the whole, friendly relations with similar and
similarly organised tribes; while obeying a most elaborate system of
rules, it is obvious that these social conditions must be very remote
from the absolutely primitive.[1] The rules of these tribes regulate
every detail of private life with a minuteness and a rigour that
remind us of what the Scottish Cavalier (1652) protested against as
"the bloody and barbarous inconveniences of Presbyterial Government."
Yet the tribes have neither presbyters, nor priests, nor kings.
Their body of customary law, so copious and complex that, to the
European, it seems as puzzling as algebra is to the savage, has been
evolved, after a certain early point, by the slow secular action of
"collective wisdom." We shall find that on this point, early deliberate
modification of law, there can be no doubt.

The recent personal researches of Mr. Howitt and Messrs. Spencer
and Gillen make it certain that tribal affairs, now, among many
tribes at least, are discussed with the utmost deliberation, and that
modifications of institutions may be canvassed, adopted, or rejected,
on the initiative of seniors, local "Headmen," and medicine men.[2] It
is also certain that tribe borrows from tribe, in the matter of songs,
dances, and institutions, while members of one tribe are permitted to
be present at the sacred ceremonials of others, especially when these
tribes are on intermarrying terms.[3] In such cases, the ceremonials
of one tribe may affect those of another, the Arunta may influence the
Urabunna, who borrow their sacred objects or _churinga_ for use in
their own rites. We even hear of cases in which native religious ideas
have been propagated by missionaries sent from tribe to tribe.[4]

Thus, conservative as is the savage by nature, he is distinctly capable
of deliberate modification of his rites, ceremonies, and customary
laws, and of interchanging ideas on these subjects with neighbouring
tribes.

All this is true, to-day, and doubtless has long been true.

But at this point we must guard against what we consider a prevalent
fallacy. The legislative action of the natives, the initiative of local
Headmen, and Heads of Totems and of "Classes" (social divisions), and
of medicine men inspired by "some supernatural being, such as Kutchi
of the Dieri, Bunjil of the Wurunjerri, or Daramulun of the Coast
Murring,"[5] is only rendered possible by the existence, to-day, of
social conditions which cannot be primitive. To-day the Tribe, with
its innumerable rules, and its common faith in Kutchi or Daramulun,
with its recognised local or social Headmen, with its regulations for
dealing with other tribes, and with its heralds or messengers, is an
institution "in being." But, necessarily, this was not always so; the
Tribe itself is a great "conquest of culture," and that conquest must
have been made very slowly.

The prevalent fallacy, then, is to take unconsciously for granted
that the people was, from the beginning, regimented into tribes, or
existed in "hordes" already as capable as actual tribes of deliberative
assemblies and legislative action, and that, in these hordes, a certain
law, "the universal basis of their social system, was brought about by
intention," as Mr. Howitt believes.[6]

The law in question, "the universal basis of their social system,"
was nothing less than a rule compelling people who had hitherto been
promiscuous in their unions, to array themselves into a pair of tribal
divisions, in which no member might marry another member of the same
division, but must marry a member of the opposite division. The mere
idea of such an act of legislation, for which no motive is assigned
(and no motive is conceivable) postulates the pre-existence of a
community like the Tribe of to-day, with powers to legislate, and to
secure obedience for its legislative acts. This postulate cannot be
granted, it refracts the institutions of to-day on a past state of
society which, in all probability, could possess no such institutions.
The "chaotic horde" of the hypothesis could not allot to various human
groups the duty of working magic (to take an instance) for the good of
various articles of the common food supply, nor could it establish
a new and drastic rule, suddenly regulating sexual unions which had
previously been utterly unregulated.

Human history does not show us a relatively large mass segregating
itself into smaller communities. It shows us small communities
aggregating into larger combinations, the village into the city, the
European tribes into the kingdom, the kingdoms into the nation, the
nation into the empire. The Tribe itself, in savage society, is a
combination of small kins, or sets of persons of various degrees of
status; these kins have not been legislatively segregated out of a
pre-existing horde having powers of legislation. The idea of such a
legislative primeval horde has been unconsciously borrowed from the
actual Tribe of experience to-day.

That tribe is not primitive, far from it, but is very old.

Tribal collective wisdom, when once the tribe was evolved, has
probably been at work, in unrecorded ages, over all the world, and in
most places seems, up to a certain point, to have followed much the
same strange course. The path does not march straight to any point
predetermined by man, but loops, and zigzags, and retreats, and returns
on itself, like the course of a river beset by rocks and shoals, and
parcelled into wandering streams, and lagging in morasses. Yet the
river reaches the sea, and the loops and links of the path, frayed by
innumerable generations of early men, led at last to the haven of the
civilised Family, and the Family Peace.

The history of the progress must necessarily be written in the
strange characters of savage institutions, and in these odd and
elaborate regulations which alarm the incurious mind under the names
of "Phratries," "Totems," "Matrimonial Classes," "Pirrauru," and
"Piraungaru." In these, as in some Maya or Easter Island inscription,
graven in bizarre signs, lies the early social history of Man. We pore
over the characters, turning them this way and that, deciphering a mark
here and there, but unable to agree on any coherent rendering of the
whole, so that some scholars deem the problems insoluble--and most are
at odds among themselves.

Possibly we can at last present a coherent translation of the record
which lies half concealed and half revealed in the savage institutions
with their uncouth names, and can trace the course of an evolution
which, beginning in natural passions, emotions, and superstitions,
reached a rudimentary social law. That law, again, from a period far
behind our historical knowledge, has been deliberately modified by men,
much as a Bill in Parliament is modified by amendments and compromises
into an Act. The industry of students who examine the customs of the
remotest races has accumulated a body of evidence in which the various
ways out of early totemic society towards the civilised conception of
the family may be distinctly traced.

Meanwhile we are concerned rather with the way into totemism out of a
prior non-totemic social condition, and with the development of the
various stages of totemic society in Australia. The natives of that
country, when unspoiled by European influences, are almost on one
level as to material culture. Some tribes have rather better and more
permanent shelters than others; some have less inadequate canoes than
the rest; some drape themselves against cold weather in the skins of
beasts, while others go bare; but all are non-agricultural hunting
wanderers, without domesticated animals, without priests, and without
chiefs on the level of those of the old Highland clans. They are
ignorant of pottery, a fact which marks the very lowest culture; they
know not the bow and arrow; their implements of stone vary from the
polished "neolithic" to the rough-hewn "palæolithic" type: a man will
use either sort as occasion serves.

While everyday life and its implements are thus rude, there are great
varieties of social organisation, of ceremonial institutions, and of
what, among Europeans, would be called speculative and religious ideas,
expressing themselves in myths and rites.

Taking social organisation first, we begin with what all inquirers
(except one or two who wrote before the recent great contributions to
knowledge appeared) acknowledge to be the most pristine type extant
Each tribe of this type is in two intermarrying divisions (which we
call "exogamous moieties," or "phratries"), and each phratry bears
a name which, when it can be translated, is, as a rule, that of an
animal.[7] We shall show later why the meaning of the names has often
been lost. Take the animal names of the phratries to be Emu and
Kangaroo, no man of the Emu phratry may marry a woman of the same
phratry, he must marry out of his phratry ("exogamy"); nor may a man
of the Kangaroo phratry marry a woman of the same. Kangaroo phratry
must marry into Emu, and Emu into Kangaroo. The phratry names in each
case are, in the more primitive types of the organisation (which alone
we are now considering) inherited from the mother.[8] A man of the Emu
phratry marries a woman of the Kangaroo phratry, and to that phratry
her children belong. Thus members of either phratry must be found in
any casual knot or company of natives. Within each phratry there are,
again, kinships also known by hereditary names of animals or plants.
Thus, in Emu phratry, there may be kins called, say, Emu, Opossum,
Wallaby, Grub, and others; in the Kangaroo phratry _different_ names
prevail, such as Kangaroos, Lizards, Dingoes, Cockatoos, and others.
The name-giving animals, in this case, are called by us "totems," and
the human kins which bear their names are called "totem kins." No man
or woman may marry a person of his or her own totem. But this, in fact,
as matters stand in Australia, puts no fresh bar on marriage, because
(except in four or five tribes of the Centre) if a man marries out
of his phratry he must necessarily marry out of his totem kin, since
there are no members of his totem name in the phratry into which he
must marry. In America, in cases where there are no phratries, and
universally, where totems exist without phratries, marriage between
persons of the same totem is forbidden.

The organisation of the more primitive tribes presents only the two
exogamous moieties or phratries in each tribe and the totem kins in the
phratries. We have Crow phratry and Eagle Hawk phratry, and, within
Crow phratry, Crow totem kin,[9] with other totem kins; within Eagle
Hawk phratry, Eagle Hawk totem kin, with other totem kins, which are
never of the same names as those in Crow phratry.

This we call the primitive type, all the other organisations are the
result of advances on and modifications of this organisation. It also
occurs in America,[10] where, however, the phratry is seldom extant,
though it does exist occasionally, and is known to have existed among
the Iroquois and to have decayed.

On examining Mr. Howitt's map[11] it will be seen that this type of
social organisation extends, or has extended, from Mount Gambier, by
the sea, in the extreme south, past Lake Eyre, to some distance beyond
Cooper's Creek or the Barcoo River, and even across the Diamantina
River in Queensland. But it is far from being the case that all tribes
with this pristine organisation possess identical ceremonies and ideas.
On the other hand, from the southern borders of Lake Eyre, northwards,
the tribes of this social organisation have peculiar ceremonies,
unknown in the south and east, but usual further north and west. They
initiate young men with the rites of circumcision or subincision (a
cruel process unknown outside of Australia), or with both. In the
south-east the knocking out of a front tooth takes the place of these
bloody ordeals. The Lake Eyre tribes, again, do not, like those south
and east of them, hold by, and inculcate at the rites, "the belief as
to the existence of a great supernatural anthropomorphic Being, by
whom the ceremonies were first instituted, and who still communicates
with mankind through the medicine men, his servants."[12] Their myths
rather repose on the idea of beings previous to man, "the prototypes
of, but more powerful in magic than the native tribes. These beings, if
they did not create man, at least perfected him from some unformed and
scarcely human creatures."[13]

Thus, the more northern tribes of primitive tribal organisation (say
the Dieri and their congeners) have beliefs which might ripen into
the Greek mythology of gods and Titans, while the faith of the tribes
of the same social organisation, further south by east, might develop
into a rude form of Hebrew monotheism, and the two myths may co-exist,
and often do. The northern tribes about Lake Eyre, and the central and
north tribes, work co-operative magic for the behoof of their totem
animals, as part of the common food supply, a rite unknown to the south
and east. They also practise a custom (_Pirrauru_) of allotting men
and women, married or unmarried, as paramours to each other, after a
symbolic ceremony. This arrangement also is unknown in the south and
east, and even north by west, though almost everywhere there is sexual
licence at certain ceremonial meetings. It is thus plain that the more
northern tribes of the primitive organisation described, differ from
their southern and eastern neighbours (i.) in their most important
initiatory rites, (ii.) in some of their myths or beliefs,[14] (iii.)
in their totemic magic, and (iv.) in their allotment of permanent
paramours. In the first three points these northern tribes of primitive
type resemble, not the south-eastern tribes of the same social
type, but the more socially advanced central, western, and northern
"nations," with whom some of them are in touch and even intermarry.
It is a dangerous fallacy to suppose that all tribes of the primitive
tribal organisation are _solidaires_ as to marriage, ceremonial rites,
and beliefs.

It is difficult to say which is the second type of tribal organisation.
We have in Victoria, in a triangle with its apex on the Murray River,
the organisation already described (1), but here descent is reckoned
in the male, not in the female line. This implies some social advance:
social institutions, with male descent of the totem name, are certain
to become _local_, rather than totemistic. The Kangaroos, deriving the
totem name from the father, are a local clan, in some cases, like the
MacIans in Glencoe. The Kangaroo name prevails in the locality. This
cannot occur, obviously, when the names are derived from mothers, and
the women go to the husband's district. We may call the organisation
thus described (2a), and as (2b) we should reckon the organisation
which prevails, as a rule, on the east of Southern Australia, in
Queensland and New South Wales, from the northerly and southern
coast-line (with a gap in the centre of the coast-line), to the eastern
limits of (1). Here we find (2b) a great set of tribes having female
descent, but each individual belongs not only to one of two phratries,
and to a totem, but also to a "Matrimonial Class." In each phratry
there are two such classes. Among the Kamilaroi, in phratry Dilbi, are
"classes" named Muri (male) and Kubi (male). In phratry Kupathin are
Ipai (male) and Kumbo (male), while the women bear the feminine forms
of these names. Their meaning is usually unknown, but in two or three
tribes, where the meaning of the class names is known with certainty,
they denote animals.

The arrangement works thus, a man of phratry Dilbi, and of matrimonial
class Muri, may not marry any woman that he chooses, in the other
phratry, Kupathin. He can only marry a Kubatha, that is, a female of
the class Kumbo. Their children, female descent prevailing, are of
Kupathin _phratry_, and of the mother's totem, but do not belong to the
_class_ either of father (Muri) or of mother (Kumbo). _They must belong
to the other class within her phratry_, namely Ipai. This rule applies
throughout; thus, if a man of phratry Dilbi, and of Kubi class, marries
a woman of Ipai class in phratry Kupathin, their children are neither
of class Kubi nor of class Ipai, but of class Kumbo, the linked or
sister class of Ipai, in Kupathin phratry.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the class names denote, or once
denoted animals, so that, say--

In phratry
                { Muri = Turtle.
   _Dilbi_ { Kubi = Bat.

While in phratry
                   { Ipai  = Carpet Snake.
   _Kupathin_ { Kumbo = Native Cat.

It is obvious that male Turtle would marry female Cat, and (with
maternal descent) their children would, by class name, be Carpet
Snakes. Bat would marry Carpet Snake, and their children would, by
class name, be Cats. Persons of each generation would thus belong to
classes of different animal names for ever, and no one might marry into
either his or her own phratry, his or her own totem, or his or her own
generation, that is, into his or her own class. It is exactly (where
the classes bear animal names) as if two _generations_ had totems.
The mothers of Muri class in Dilbi would have Turtle, the mothers in
Kupathin (Ipai) would have Carpet Snake. Their children, in Kupathin,
would have Cat. Not only the phratries and the totem kins, but each
successive generation, would thus be delimited by bearing an animal
name, and marriage would be forbidden between all persons not of
different animal-named phratries, different animal-named totem kins,
and different animal-named generations. In many cases, we repeat, the
names of the phratries and of the classes have not yet been translated,
and the meanings are unknown to the natives themselves. That the class
names were originally animal names is a mere hypothesis, based on few
examples.

Say I am of phratry Crow, of totem Lizard, of generation and
matrimonial class Turtle; then I must marry only a woman of phratry
Eagle Hawk, of any totem in Eagle Hawk phratry,[15] and of generation
and class name Cat. Our children, with female descent, will be of
phratry Eagle Hawk, of totem the mother's, and of generation and class
name Carpet Snake. _Their_ children will be of phratry Crow, of totem
the mother's, and of generation and class name Cat again; and so on
for ever. Each generation in a phratry has its class name, and may
not marry within that name. The next generation has the other class
name, and may not marry within that. Assuming that phratry names,
totem names, and generation names are always names of animals (or of
other objects in nature), the laws would amount, we repeat, simply to
this: No person may marry another person who, by phratry, or totem,
or generation, owns the same hereditary animal name or other name
as himself or herself. Moreover no one may marry a person (where
matrimonial classes exist) who bears the same class or generation name
as his mother or father.

In practice the rules are thus quite simple, mistake is
impossible--complicated as the arrangements look on paper. Where
totem and phratry names only exist, a man has merely to ask a woman,
"What is your phratry name?" If it is his own, an amour is forbidden.
Where phratry names are obsolete, and classes exist, he has only to
ask, "What is your class name?" If it is that of either class in
his own phratry of the tribe, to love is to break a sacred law. It
is not necessary, as a rule, even to ask the totem name. What looks
so perplexing is in essence, and in practical working, of extreme
simplicity. But some tribes have deliberately modified the rules, to
facilitate marriage.

The conspicuous practical result of the Class arrangement (not
primitive), is that just as totem law makes it impossible for a person
to marry a sister or brother uterine, so Class law makes a marriage
between father and daughter, mother and son, impossible.[16] But such
marriages never occur in Australian tribes of pristine organisation
(1) which have no class names, no collective names for successive
generations. The origin of these class or generation names is a problem
which will be discussed later.

Such is the Class system where it exists in tribes with female descent.
It has often led to the loss and disappearance of the phratry names,
which are forgotten, since the two sets of opposed class names do the
phratry work.

We have next (3) the same arrangements with descent reckoned in the
male line. This prevails on the south-east coast, from Hervey River to
Warwick. In Gippsland, and in a section round Melbourne, there were
"anomalous" arrangements which need not now detain us; the archaic
systems tended to die out altogether.

All these south central (Dieri), southern, and eastern tribes may
be studied in Mr. Howitt's book, already cited, which contains the
result of forty years' work, the information being collected partly by
personal research and partly through many correspondents. Mr. Howitt
has viewed the initiatory ceremonies of more than one tribe, and is
familiar with their inmost secrets.

For the tribes of the centre and north we must consult two books, the
fruits of the personal researches of Mr. Baldwin Spencer, M.A., F.R.S.,
Professor of Biology in the University of Melbourne, and of Mr. F. J.
Gillen, Sub-Protector of Aborigines, South Australia.[17] For many
years Mr. Gillen has been in the confidence of the tribes, and he and
Mr. Spencer have passed many months in the wilds, being admitted to
view the most secret ceremonies, and being initiated into the myths of
the people. Their photographs of natives are numerous and excellent.

These observers begin in the south centre, where Mr. Howitt leaves off
in his northerly researches, and go north. They start with the Urabunna
tribe, north-east of Lake Eyre, congeners of Mr. Howitt's Dieri, and
speaking a dialect akin to theirs, while the tribe intermarry marry
with the Arunta (whose own dialect has points in common with theirs)
of the centre of the continent These Urabunna are apparently in the
form of social organisation which we style primitive (No. 1), but there
are said, rather vaguely, to be more restrictions on marriage than is
usual, people of one totem in Kiraru phratry being restricted to people
of one totem in Matteri phratry.[18]

They have phratries, totem kins, apparently no matrimonial classes
(some of their rules are imperfectly ascertained), and they reckon
descent in the female line. But, like the Dieri (and unlike the tribes
of the south and east), they practise subincision; they have, or are
said to have, no belief in "a supernatural anthropomorphic great
Being"; they believe in "old semi-human ancestors," who scattered about
spirits, which are perpetually reincarnated in new members of the
tribe; they practise totemic magic; and they cultivate the Dieri custom
of allotting paramours. Thus, by social organisation, they attach
themselves to the south-eastern tribes (1), but, like the Dieri, and
even more so (for, unlike the Dieri, they believe in reincarnation),
they agree in ceremonies, and in the general idea of their totemic
magic, rites, and mythical ideas, with tribes who, as regards social
organisation, are in state (4), reckon descent in the male line, and
possess, not _four_, but _eight_ matrimonial classes.

This institution of eight classes is developing in the Arunta "nation,"
the people of the precise centre of Australia, who march with, and
intermarry with, the Urabunna; at least the names for the second set of
four matrimonial classes, making eight in all, are reaching the Arunta
from the northern tribes. All the way further north to the Gulf of
Carpentaria, male descent and eight classes prevail, with subincision,
prolonged and complex ceremonials, the belief in reincarnation of
primal semi-human, semi-bestial ancestors, and the absence (except
in the Kaitish tribe, next the Arunta) of any known belief in what
Mr. Howitt calls the "All Father." Totemic magic also is prevalent,
dwindling as you approach the north-east coast. In consequence of
reckoning in the male line (which necessarily causes most of the
dwellers in a group to be of the same totem), _local_ organisation is
more advanced in these tribes than in the south and east.

We next speak of social organisation (5), namely, that of the Arunta
and Kaitish tribes, which is without example in any other known totemic
society all over the world. The Arunta and Kaitish not only believe,
like most northern and western tribes, in the perpetual reincarnation
of ancestral spirits, but they, and they alone, hold that each such
spirit, during discarnate intervals, resides in, or is mainly attached
to, a decorated kind of stone amulet, called _churinga nanja_. These
objects, with this myth, are not recorded as existing among other
"nations." When a child is born, its friends hunt for its ancestral
stone amulet in the place where its mother thinks that she conceived
it, and around the nearest _rendezvous_ of discarnate _local_ totemic
souls, all of one totem only. The amulet and the _local_ totemic
centre, with its haunted _nanja_ rock or tree, determine the totem
of the child. Thus, unlike all other totemists, the Arunta do not
inherit their totems either from father or mother, or both. Totems are
determined by _local_ accident. Not being hereditary, they are not
exogamous: here, and here alone, they do not regulate marriage. Men
may, and do, marry women of their own totem, and their child's totem
may neither be that of its father nor of its mother. The members of
totem groups are really members of societies, which co-operatively
work magic for the good of the totems. The question arises, Is this
the primitive form of totemism? We shall later discuss that question
(Chapter IV.).

Meanwhile we conceive the various types of social organisation to
begin with the south-eastern phratries, totems, and female reckoning
of descent (1) to advance to these _plus_ male descent (2a), and to
these with female descent and four matrimonial classes (2b). Next
we place (3) that four-class system with male descent; next (4) the
north-western system of male descent with _eight_ matrimonial classes,
and last (as anomalous in some respects), (5) the Arunta-Kaitish system
of male descent, eight classes, and non-hereditary non-exogamous totems.

As regards ceremonial and belief, we place (1) the tribes south
and east of the Dieri. (2) The Dieri. (3) The Urabunna, and north,
central, and western tribes. (4) The Arunta. The Dieri and Urabunna we
regard (at least the Dieri) as pristine in social organisation, with
peculiarities all their own, but in ceremonial and belief more closely
attached to the central, north, and west than to the south-eastern
tribes. As concerns the bloody rites, Mr. Howitt inclines to the belief
(corroborated by legends, whatever their value) that "a northern origin
must ultimately be assigned to these ceremonies."[19] It is natural to
assume that the more cruel initiatory rites are the more archaic, and
that the tribes which practise them are the more pristine. But this is
not our opinion nor that of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. The older rite
is the mere knocking out of front teeth (also used by the Masai of East
Central Africa). This rite, in Central Australia, "has lost its old
meaning, its place has been taken by other rites."[20] ... Increased
cruelty accompanies social advance in this instance. In another matter
innovation comes from the north. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen are of the
opinion that "changes in totemic matters have been slowly passing down
from north to south." The eight classes, in place of four classes, are
known as a matter of fact to have actually "reached the Arunta from the
north, and at the present moment are spreading south-wards."[21]

Again, a feebler form of the reincarnation belief, namely, that
souls of the young who die uninitiated are reincarnated, occurs in
the Euahlayi tribe of north-western New South Wales.[22] Whether the
Euahlayi belief came from the north, in a limited way, or whether it
is the germinal state of the northern belief, is uncertain. It is
plain that if bloody rites and eight classes may come down from the
north, totemic magic and the faith in reincarnation may also have
done so, and thus modified the rites and "religious" opinions of
the Dieri and Urabunna, who are said still to be, socially, in the
most pristine state, that of phratries and female descent, without
matrimonial classes.[23] It is also obvious that if the Kaitish faith
in a sky-dweller (rare in northern tribes) be a "sport," and if the
Arunta _churinga nanja, plus_ non-hereditary and non-exogamous
totems, be a "sport," the Dieri and Urabunna custom, too, of solemnly
allotted _permanent_ paramours may be a thing of isolated and special
development, not a survival of an age of "group marriage."

[1] Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 41. 1904.

[2] Cf. for example Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central
Australia_, p. 26. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp.
88, 89.

[3] Howitt, _ut supra_, pp. 511, 513.

[4] Hale, _U.S. Exploring Expedition_, p. 410. 1846.

[5] Howitt, _ut supra_, p. 89.

[6] Op. cit., p. 89.

[7] There are exceptions, or at least one exception is known to the
rule of animal names for phratries, a point to which we shall return.
Dr. Roth (_N.W. Central Queensland Aborigines_, p. 56) suggests that
the phratry names Wutaru and Pakuta mean One and Two (cf. p. 26).
For Wutaru and Yungaru, however, interpretations indicating names
of animals are given, diversely, by Mr. Bridgman and Mr. Chatfield,
_Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, pp. 40, 41.

[8] That reckoning descent in the female line, _among totemists_,
is earlier than reckoning in the male line, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Tylor,
Dr. Durkheim, and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, with Mr. J. G. Frazer,
till recently, are agreed. Starcke says "usually the female line only
appears in connection with the Kobong (totem) groups," and he holds the
eccentric opinion that totems are relatively late, and that the tribes
with none are the more primitive! (_The Primitive Family_, p. 26,
1896.) This writer calls Mr. Howitt "a missionary."

[9] That this is the case will be proved later; the fact has hitherto
escaped observation.

[10] Frazer, _Totemism_, p. 6l. Morgan, _Ancient Society_, pp. 90, 94
_et seq_.

[11] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_. Macmillan, 1904.

[12] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 640. For examples, pp.
528-535.

[13] Ibid., p. 487.

[14] That is, on our present information. It is very unusual for
orthodox adhesion to one set of myths to prevail.

[15] Sometimes members of one totem are said to be restricted to
marriage with members of only one other totem.

[16] Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 284, citing
Mr. J. G. Frazer.

[17] _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, 1899. _Northern Tribes of
Central Australia_, 1904. Macmillan.

[18] Cf. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 188-189.
_Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 60.

[19] Howitt, _op. cit_., p. 676, _N.T._, p. 20.

[20] _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 214. The same opinion is
stated as very probable in _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p.
329.

[21] _N. T._, p. 20.

[22] Mrs. Langloh Parker's M.S.

[23] I am uncertain as to this point among the Urabunna, as will appear
later.

CHAPTER II

METHOD OF INQUIRY

      Method of inquiry--Errors to be avoided--Origin of
      totemism not to be looked for among the "sports" of
      socially advanced tribes--Nor among tribes of male
      reckoning of descent--Nor in the myths explanatory
      of origin of totemism--Myths of origin of heraldic
      bearings compared--Tribes in state of ancestor-worship:
      their totemic myths cannot be true--Case of Bantu
      myths (African)--Their myth implies ancestor-worship
      --Another African myth derives _tribal_ totems from
      tribal nicknames--No totemic myths are of any historic
      value--The use of conjecture--Every theory must start
      from conjecture--Two possible conjectures as to earliest
      men gregarious (the horde), or lonely sire, female mates,
      and off-spring--Five possible conjectures as to the
      animal names of kinships in relation to early society and
      exogamy--Theory of the author; of Professor Spencer; of
      Dr. Durkheim; of Mr. Hill-Tout; of Mr. Howitt--Note on
      McLennan's theory of exogamy.

We have now given the essential facts in the problem of early society
as it exists in various forms among the most isolated and pristine
peoples extant. It has been shown that the sets of seniority (classes),
the exogamous moieties (phratries), and the kinships in each tribe bear
names which, when translated, are usually found to denote animals.
Especially the names of the totem kindreds, and of the totems, are
commonly names of animals or plants. If we can discover why this is
so, we are near the discovery of the origin of totemism. Meanwhile we
offer some remarks as to the method to be pursued in the search for a
theory which will colligate all the facts in the case, and explain the
origin of totemic society. In the first place certain needful warnings
must be given, certain reefs which usually wreck efforts to construct
a satisfactory hypothesis must be marked.

First, it will be vain to look for the origin of totemism either
among advanced and therefore non-pristine Australian types of tribal
organisation, or among peoples not Australian, who are infinitely more
forward than the Australians in the arts of life, and in the possession
of property. Such progressive peoples may present many interesting
social phenomena, but, as regards pure _primitive_ totemism, they dwell
on "fragments of a broken world." The totemic fragments, among them,
are twisted and shattered strata, with fantastic features which cannot
be primordial, but are metamorphic. Accounts of these societies are
often puzzling, and the strange confused terms used by the reporters,
especially in America, frequently make them unintelligible.

The learned, who are curious in these matters, would have saved
themselves much time and labour had they kept two conspicuous facts
before their eyes.

(1) It is useless to look for the _origins_ of totemism among the
peculiarities and "sports" which always attend the decadence of
totemism, consequent on the change from female to male lineage, as Mr.
Howitt, our leader in these researches, has always insisted. To search
for the beginnings among late and abnormal phenomena, things isolated,
done in a corner, and not found among the tribal organisations of the
earliest types, is to follow a trail sure to be misleading.

(2) The second warning is to be inferred from the first. It is waste
of time to seek for the origin of totemism in anything--an animal
name, a sacred animal, a paternal soul tenanting an animal--which is
inherited from its first owner, he being an individual ancestor male.
Such inheritance implies the existence of reckoning descent in the male
line, and totemism conspicuously began in, and is least contaminated
in, tribes who reckon descent in the female line.

Another stone of stumbling comes from the same logical formation.
The error is, to look for origins in myths about origins, told among
advanced or early societies. If a people has advanced far in material
culture, if it is agricultural, breeds cattle, and works the metals,
of course it cannot be primitive. However, it may retain vestiges of
totemism, and, if it does, it will explain them by a story, a myth of
its own, just as modern families, and even cities, have their myths to
account for the origin, now forgotten, of their armorial bearings, or
crests--the dagger in the city shield, the skene of the Skenes, the
sawn tree of the Hamiltons, the lyon of the Stuarts.

Now an agricultural, metallurgic people, with male descent, in the
middle barbarism, will explain its survivals of totemism by a myth
natural in its intellectual and social condition; but not natural
in the condition of the homeless nomad hunters, among whom totemism
arose. For example, we have no reason to suspect that when totemism
began men had a highly developed religion of ancestor-worship. Such a
religion has not yet been evolved in Australia, where the names of the
dead are usually tabooed, where there is hardly a trace of prayers,
hardly a trace of offerings to the dead, and none of offerings to
animals.[1] The more pristine Australians, therefore, do not explain
their totems as containing the souls of ancestral spirits. On the
other hand, when the Bantu tribes of Southern Africa--agricultural,
with settled villages, with kings, and with many of the crafts, such
as metallurgy--explain the origin of their _tribal_ names derived
from animals on the lines of their religion--ancestor-worship--their
explanation may be neglected as far as our present purpose is
concerned. It is only their theory, only the myth which, in their
intellectual and religious condition, they are bound to tell, and it
can throw no light on the origin of sacred animals.

The Bantu local _tribes_, according to Mr. M'Call Theal, have _Siboko_,
that is, name-giving animals. The tribesmen will not kill, or eat, or
touch, "or in any way come into contact with" their _Siboko_, if they
can avoid doing so. A man, asked "What do you dance?" replies by giving
the name of his _Siboko_, which is, or once was, honoured in mystic or
magical dances.

"When a division of a tribe took place, each section retained the same
ancestral animal," and men thus trace dispersed segments of their
tribe, or they thus account for the existence of other tribes of the
same Siboko as themselves.

Things being in this condition, an ancestor-worshipping people has to
explain the circumstances by a myth. Being an ancestor-worshipping
people, the Bantu explain the circumstance, as they were certain to do,
by a myth of ancestral spirits. "Each tribe regarded some particular
animal as the one selected by the ghosts of its kindred, and therefore
looked upon it as sacred."

It should be superfluous to say that the Bantu myth cannot possibly
throw any tight on the real origin of totemism. The Bantu,
ancestor-worshippers of great piety, find themselves saddled with
sacred tribal _Siboko_; why, they know not. So they naturally invent
the fable that the _Siboko_, which are sacred, are sacred because they
are the shrines of what to them are really sacred, namely, ancestral
spirits.[2] But they also cherish another totally different myth to
explain their _Siboko_.

We now give this South African myth, which explains tribal _Siboko_,
and their origin, not on the lines of ancestor-worship, but, rather to
my annoyance, on the lines of my own theory of the Origin of Totems!

On December 9, 1879, the Rev. Roger Price, of Mole-pole, in the
northern Bakuena country, wrote as follows to Mr. W. G. Stow,
Geological Survey, South Africa. He gives the myth which is told to
account for the _Siboko_ or tribal sacred and name-giving animal of the
Bahurutshe--Baboons. (These animal names in this part of Africa denote
_local tribes_, not totem kins within a local tribe.)

"Tradition says that about the time the separation took place between
the Bahurutshe and the Bakuena, _Baboons_ entered the gardens of
the Bahurutshe and ate their pumpkins, before the proper time for
commencing to eat the fruits of the new year. The Bahurutshe were
unwilling that the pumpkins which the baboons had broken off and
nibbled should be wasted, and ate them accordingly. This act is said to
have led to the Bahurutshe being called Buchwene, Baboon people--which"
(namely, the Baboon) "is their _Siboko_ to this day--and their having
the precedence ever afterwards in the matter of taking the first bite
of the new year's fruits. If this be the true explanation," adds Mr.
Price, "it is evident that what is now used as a term of honour was
once a term of reproach. The Bakuena, too, are said to owe their
_Siboko_ (the Crocodile) to the fact that their people once ate an ox
which had been killed by a crocodile."

Mr. Price, therefore, is strongly inclined to think "that the _Siboko_
of all the tribes was originally a kind of nickname or term of
reproach, but," he adds, "there is a good deal of mystery about the
whole thing."

On this point Mr. Stow, to whom Mr. Price wrote the letter just cited,
remarks in his MS.: "From the foregoing facts it would seem possible
that the origin of the _Siboko_ among these tribes arose from some
sobriquet that had been given to them, and that, in course of time,
as their superstitious and devotional feelings became more developed,
these tribal symbols became objects of veneration and superstitious
awe, whose favour was to be propitiated or malign influence
averted...."[3]

Here it will be seen that these South African tribes account for their
_Siboko_ now by the myth deriving the sacredness of the tribal animal
from ancestor-worship, as reported by Mr. Theal, and again by nicknames
given to the tribes on account of certain undignified incidents.

This latter theory is very like my own as stated in _Social Origins_,
and to be set forth and reinforced later in this work. But the theory,
as held by the Bahurutsche and Bakuena, does not help to confirm mine
in the slightest degree. Among these very advanced African tribes,
the _Siboko_ or _tribal_ sacred animal, is the animal of the local
_tribe_, not, as in pure totemism, of the scattered exogamous kin. It
is probably a lingering remnant of totemism. The totem of the most
powerful _local_ group in a tribe having descent through males,
appears to have become the _Siboko_ of the whole tribe, while the other
totems have died out. It is not probable that a nickname of remembered
origin, given in recent times to a tribe of relatively advanced
civilisation, should, as the myth asserts, not only have become a name
of honour, but should have founded tribal animal-worship.

It was in a low state of culture no longer found on earth, that I
conceive the animal names of groups not yet totemic, names of origin no
longer remembered, to have arisen and become the germ of totemism.

Myths of the origin of totemism, in short, are of absolutely no
historic value. _Siboko_ no longer arise in the manner postulated by
these African myths; these myths are not based on experience any more
than is the Tsimshian myth of the Bear Totem, to be criticised later
in a chapter on American Totemism. We are to be on our guard, then,
against looking for the origins of totemism among the myths of peoples
of relatively advanced culture, such as the village-dwelling Indians
of the north-west coast of America. We must not look for origins among
tribes, even if otherwise pristine, who reckon by male descent. We must
look on all savage myths of origins merely as savage hypotheses, which,
in fact, usually agree with one or other of our scientific modern
hypotheses, but yield them no corroboration.

On the common fallacy of regarding the tribe of to-day, with its
relative powers, as primitive, we have spoken in Chapter I.

By the nature of the case, as the origin of totemism lies far beyond
our powers of historical examination or of experiment, we must have
recourse as regards this matter to conjecture.

Here a word might be said as to the method of conjecture about
institutions of which the origins are concealed "in the dark backward
and abysm of time."

There are conjectures and conjectures! None is capable in every detail
of historical demonstration, but one guess may explain all the known
facts, and others may explain few or none. We are dealing with human
affairs--they whose groups first answered to animal group-names were
men as much as we are. They had reason; they had human language, spoken
or by gesture, and human passions. That conjecture, therefore, which
deals with the first totemists as men, men with plenty of human nature,
is better than any rival guess which runs contrary to human nature as
known in our experience of man, savage, barbaric, or civilised.

Once more, a set of guesses which are consistent with themselves is
better than a set of guesses which can be shown to be even ludicrously
self-contradictory. If any guess, again, colligates all the known
facts, if any conjectural system will "march," will meet every known
circumstance in the face, manifestly it is a better system than one
which stumbles, breaks down, evades giving an answer to the problems,
says that they are insoluble, is in contradiction with itself, and does
not even try to colligate all the known facts. A consistent system,
unmarred by self-contradictions; in accordance with known human nature;
in accordance, too, with recognised rules of evolution, and of logic;
and co-ordinating all known facts, if it is tried on them, cannot be
dismissed with the remark that "there are plenty of other possible
guesses."

Our method must be--having already stated the facts as they present
themselves in the most primitive organisation of the most archaic
society extant--to enumerate all the possible conjectures which have
been logically (or even illogically) made as to the origin of the
institutions before us.

All theories as to how these institutions arose, must rest, primarily,
on a basis of conjecture as to the original social character of man.
Nowhere do we see absolutely _primitive_ man, and a totemic system in
the making. The processes of evolution must have been very gradually
developed in the course of distant ages, but our conjecture as to the
nature, in each case, of the processes must be in accordance with what
is known of human nature. Conjecture, too, has its logical limitations.

We must first make our choice, therefore, between the guess that the
earliest human beings lived in very small groups (as, in everyday life,
the natives of Australia are in many cases still compelled to do by the
precarious nature of their food supplies), or the guess that earliest
man was gregarious, and dwelt in a promiscuous horde with no sort of
restraint. One or other view must be correct.

On the former guess (men originally lived in very small groups), the
probable mutual hostility of group to rival group, the authority of the
strongest male in each group, and the passions of jealousy, love, and
hate, must inevitably have produced _some_ rudimentary restrictions on
absolute archaic freedom. Some people would be prevented from doing
some things, they must have been checked by the hand of the stronger;
and from the habit of restraint customary rules would arise. The
advocates of the alternative conjecture--that man was gregarious, and
utterly promiscuous--take it for granted (it seems to me) that the
older and stronger males established no rudimentary restrictions on
the freedom of the affections, but allowed the young males to share
with them the females in the horde, and that they permitted both
sexes to go entirely as they pleased, till, for some unknown reason
and by some unknown authority, the horde was bisected into exogamous
moieties (phratries), and after somehow developing totem kins (unless
animal-named magical groups had been previously developed, on purpose
to work magic), became a tribe with two phratries.

It is not even necessary for us to deny that the ancestors of man were
_originally_ communal and gregarious. What we deem to be impossible is
that, till man had developed into something more like himself, as we
know him, than an animal without jealousy, and ignorant of anything
prejudicial to any one's interests in promiscuous unions, he could
begin to evolve his actual tribal institutions. This is also the
opinion of Mr. Howitt, as we shall see later.

Thus whoever tries to disengage the evolutionary processes which
produced the existing society of Australia must commence by making his
choice between the two conjectures--early man gregarious, promiscuous,
and anarchist; or early man unsociable, fierce, bullying, and jealous.
A _via media_ is attempted, however, by Mr. Howitt, to which we shall
return.

Next, it is clear and certain that some human beliefs about the
animals which give their names, in known cases, to the two large
exogamous divisions of the tribe (phratries), and about the other
animals which give names to the totem kins, and, in one or two cases,
to the matrimonial classes, must be, in some way, connected with the
prohibitions to marry, first within the phratries, then, perhaps,
within the totem kins, then within the Classes (or within the same
generation).

Thus there are here five courses which conjecture can logically take.

(a) Members of certain recognised human groups already married
habitually out of their group into other groups, _before_ the animal
names (now totem names) were given to the groups. The names came later
and merely marked, at first, and then sanctioned, the limits within
which marriage had already been forbidden while the groups were still
nameless.

Or (b) the animal names of the phratries and totem kins existed
(perhaps as denoting groups which worked magic for the behoof of each
animal) _before_ marriage was forbidden within their limits. Later, for
some reason, prohibitions were enacted.

Or (c) at one time there were no marriage regulations at all, but
these arose when, apparently for some religious reason, a hitherto
undivided communal horde split into two sections, each of which revered
a different name-giving animal as their "god" (totem), claimed descent
from it, and, out of respect to their "god," did not marry any of
those who professed its faith, and were called by its name, but always
married persons of _another_ name and "god."

Or (d) men were at first in groups, intermarrying within the group.
These groups received names from animals and other objects, because
individual men adopted animal "familiars," as Bear, Elk, Duck, Potato,
Pine-tree. The sisters of the men next adopted these animal or
vegetable "familiars," or protective creatures, from their brothers,
and bequeathed them, by female descent, to their children. These
children became groups bearing such names as Bear, Potato, Duck, and
so on. These groups made treaties of marriage with each other, for
political reasons of acquiring strength by union. The treaties declared
that Duck should never marry Duck, but always Elk, and _vice versa_.
This was exogamy, instituted for political purposes, to use the word
"political" proleptically.

Or (e) men were at first in a promiscuous incestuous horde, but,
perceiving the evils of this condition (whatever these evils might be
taken to be), they divided it into two halves, of which one must never
marry within itself, but always in the other. To these divisions animal
names were given; they are the phratries. They threw off colonies, or
accepted other groups, which took new animal names, and are now the
totem kins.

Finally, in (f) conjectures (a) and (c) may be combined thus: groups
of men, still nameless as groups, had for certain reasons the habit of
not marrying within themselves; but, after receiving animal names, they
developed an idea that the animal of each group was its kinsman, and
that, for a certain superstitious reason, it was even more wrong than
it had been before, to marry "within the blood" of the animal, as, for
Emu to marry Emu. Or (f2) the small groups did marry within themselves
till, _after_ receiving animal names, they evolved the superstition
that such marriage was a sin against the animals, and so became
exogamous.

On the point of the original state of society conjecture seems to be
limited to this field of possible choices. At least I am acquainted
with no theory hitherto propounded, which does not set out from one
or other of these conjectural bases. We must not attack each other's
ideas merely because they start from conjectures: they can start in
no other way. Our method must be to discover which conjecture, as it
is developed, most consistently and successfully colligates all the
ascertained facts and best endures the touchstone of logic.

Of the hypotheses enumerated above, the system to be advocated here is
that marked (f 1 and 2). Men, whatever their brutal ancestors may have
done, when they became men indeed, lived originally in small anonymous
local groups, and had, for a reason to be given, the habit of selecting
female mates from groups _not_ their own. Or, if they had not this
habit they developed the rule, after the previously anonymous local
groups had received animal names, and after the name-giving animals
came to receive the measure of respect at present given to them as
totems.

The second hypothesis (b) (that the animal names of the groups were
originally those of societies which worked magic, each for an animal,
and that the prohibition on marriage was _later_ introduced) has been
suggested by Professor Baldwin Spencer and Mr. J. G. Frazer, and is
accepted by Mr. Howitt.

The third conjecture (c) (man originally promiscuous, but ceasing to
be so from religious respect for the totem, or "god") is that of Dr.
Durkheim.

The fourth theory (d) is that of Mr. Hill-Tout.[4]

The fifth theory (e) was that of Mr. Howitt. He now adopts the similar
theory of Mr. Spencer (b).

[1] The Dieri tribe do pray to the Mura-Mura, or _mythical_ ancestors,
but not, apparently, to the _remembered_ dead.

[2] "Totemism, South Africa," J. G. Frazer, _Man_, 1901, No. III.
Mr. Frazer does not, of course, adopt the Bantu myth as settling the
question.

[3] Stow, MSS., 820. I owe the extract to Miss C. G. Burne.

[4] I have not included the theory of Dr. Westermarck, in the _History
of Human Marriage_, because that work is written without any reference
to totemism.

NOTE

      I have not included the theory of Mr. J. F. McLennan, the
      founder of all research into totemism. In his opinion,
      totemism, that is, the possession by different stocks of
      different name-giving animals, "is older than exogamy in
      all cases." That is, as Mr. Robertson Smith explains, "it
      is easy to see that exogamy necessarily presupposes the
      existence of a system of kinship which took no account
      of degrees, but only of participation in a common stock.
      Such an idea as this could not be conceived by savages
      in an abstract form; it must necessarily have had a
      concrete expression, or rather must have been thought
      under a concrete and tangible form, and that form seems
      to have been always supplied by totemism." (_Kinship and
      Marriage in Early Arabia_, p. 189, 1885). This means
      that, before they were exogamous, men existed in groups
      of animal name, as Ravens, Wolves, Ants, and so on. When
      they became conscious of kinship, and resolved to marry
      out of the kin, or stock, they fixed the name, say Raven,
      Wolf, or what not, as the limit within which there must
      be no marriage. But Mr. McLennan's theory as to why they
      determined to take no wives within the stock and name, has
      never been accepted. (See Westermarck, _History of Human
      Marriage_, pp. 311-314.)

      Mr. McLennan supposed that female infanticide made women
      scarce in each group, and that therefore they stole each
      other's girls, and, finally, abstained from their own.
      But the objections to this hypothesis are infinite and
      obvious. At one time Mr. McLennan thought that tattooing
      was the origin of totemism. Members of each group tattooed
      the semblance of an animal on their flesh--but, as far as
      I am aware, he did not ask why they adopted this practice.
      Manifestly a sense of some special connection between the
      animal and the group must have been prior to the marking
      of the members of the group with the effigy of the animal.
      What gave rise to this belief in the connection? (See
      Chapter VI., criticism of Dr. Pikler). Mr, McLennan merely
      mentioned to me, in conversation, this idea, which he
      later abandoned. It had previously occurred to Garcilasso
      de la Vega that the _germ_ of totemism was to be found in
      the mere desire to differentiate group from group; which
      is the theory to be urged later, the _names_ being the
      instruments of differentiation.

      Mr. A. K. Keane, as in Mr. McLennan's abandoned
      conjecture, and as in the theory of Dr. Pikler, makes
      totemism arise in "heraldic badges," "a mere device for
      distinguishing one individual from another, one family or
      clan group from another ... the personal or family name
      precedes the totem, which grows out of it." (Ethnology,
      pp. 9, II).

THEORY OF PRIMAL PROMISCUITY

      Why did man, if once promiscuous, regulate the relations
      of the sexes?--Theory of Professor Spencer--Animal-named
      magical societies were prior to regulation of
      marriage--Theory of Mr. Howitt--Regulations introduced by
      inspired medicine man--His motives unknown--The theory
      postulates the pristine existence of the organised tribe
      of to-day, and of belief in the All Father--Reasons
      for holding that men were originally promiscuous: (1)
      So-called survival of so-called "group marriage"; (2)
      Inclusive names of human relationships--Betrothals
      not denied--A form of marriage--Mitigated by
      _Pirauru_--Allotment of paramours at feasts--Is
      _Pirauru_ a survival of group marriage?--Or a rare case
      of limitation of custom of feasts of license--Examples
      of such saturnalia--Fiji, Arunta, Urabunna,
      Dieri--Degrees of license--Argument against the author's
      opinion--Laws of incest older than marriage--Names of
      relationships--Indicate tribal status, not degrees of
      consanguinity--Fallacy exposed--Starcke _versus_ Morgan's
      theory of primal promiscuity--Dr. Durkheim on Choctaw
      names of relationships--A man cannot regard his second
      cousin as his mother--Dr. Fison on anomalous terms of
      relationship--Grandfathers and grandsons call each other
      "brothers"--_Noa_ denotes a man's wife and also all
      women whom he might legally wed--Proof that terms of
      relationship do not denote consanguinity--The _Pirrauru_
      custom implies previous marriage, and is not logically
      thinkable without it--Descriptions of _Pirrauru_--The
      _Kandri_ ceremony merely modifies pre-existing
      marriage--_Pirrauru_ is not "group marriage"--Is found
      only in tribes of the Matteri Kiraru phratries--Not found
      in south-eastern tribes--Mr. Howitt's "survivals" do not
      mean "group marriage."

In the theories which postulate that man began in a communal horde,
with no idea of regulating sexual unions at all--because, having no
notion of consanguinity, or of harm in consanguine marriages, he saw
nothing to regulate--the initial difficulty is, how did he ever come
to change his nature and to see that a rule must be made, as made it
has been? Mr. Howitt endeavours (if I grasp his meaning) to show
how man did at last see it, and therefore bisected the horde into
intermarrying phratries. Mr. Spencer has only asserted that, while man
saw nothing to regulate in marriages, he evolved an organisation, that
of the phratries and classes, which did come, somehow, to regulate
them. Dr. Durkheim takes it, that man if he was originally promiscuous,
later regulated marriages out of respect to his totems, which were his
gods. Mr. Hill-Tout supposes that the exogamous rules were made for
"political" reasons.

The theories of Mr. Howitt and Mr. Spencer differed from each other,
originally, only in so far as that Mr. Spencer supposes animal-named
_magical societies_ (now totemic) to have arisen _before_ man regulated
marriage in any way; whereas this conception of animal-named groups
not bound by totemic restrictions on marriage had not occurred to Mr.
Howitt or any other inquirer, except Mr. J. G. Frazer, who evolved
it independently. Mr. Spencer's theory in this matter rests entirely
on his discovery, among the Arunta, in Central Australia, of totems
marking magical societies, but not regulating marriage, and on his
inference that, in the beginning, animal-named groups were everywhere
mere magical societies. To work co-operative magic was their primary
function. To that opinion Mr. Howitt has now come in, and he adds that
"the division of the tribe" (into the two primary exogamous moieties
or phratries, or "classes") "was made with intent to regulate the
relations of the sexes."[1] On one point, we repeat, namely, _why_
division was made, Mr. Spencer utters no certain sound, nor does Mr.
Howitt explicitly tell us for what reason sexual relations, hitherto
unregulated, were supposed to need regulation. He conceives that there
is "a widespread belief in the supernatural origin of the practice,"
but that explains nothing.[2]

Thus Mr. Howitt postulates the existence of a "tribe," divided
into animal-named magical societies, and promiscuous. The tribe
has "medicine men" who see visions. One of these men, conceiving,
no one knows why, that it would be an excellent thing to regulate
the relations of the sexes, announces to his fellow-men that he has
received from a supernatural being a command to do so. If they approve,
they declare the supernatural message "to the assembled headmen at one
of the ceremonial meetings," the tribe obeys, and divides itself into
the two primary exogamous moieties or phratries.[3] Mr. Howitt thus
postulates the existence of the organised tribe, with its prophets, its
"All Father" (such as Daramulun), its magical societies, its recognised
headmen, and its public meetings for ceremonial and legislation, all in
full swing, before the relations of the sexes are in any way regulated.

On reflection, Mr. Howitt may find difficulties in this postulate.
Meanwhile, we ask what made the very original medicine man, the Moses
of the tribe, think of the new and drastic command which he brought
down from the local Sinai? Why did this thinker suppose that the
relations of the sexes ought to be regulated? Perhaps the idea was the
inspiration of a dream. Mr. Spencer, acquainted chiefly with tribes who
have no All Father, has not advanced this theory.

The reasons given for supposing that the "tribe" was originally
promiscuous are partly based (a) on the actual condition as regards
individual marriage of some Australian tribes, mainly Dieri and
Urabunna, with their congeners. These tribes, it is argued, are now
no longer absolutely promiscuous, but men and women are divided into
intermarriageable sets, so that all women of a certain status in Emu
phratry are, or their predecessors have been, actual wives of all
men of the corresponding status in Kangaroo phratry. The only bar
to absolute promiscuity is that of the phratries (established by
legislation on this theory), and of certain by-laws, of relatively
recent institution. The names for human relationships (father, mother,
son, daughter, brother, sister), again, (b) are, it is argued, such as
"group marriage," and "group marriage" alone, would inevitably produce.
All women of a certain status are my "mothers," all men of a certain
status are my "fathers," all women of another status are my "sisters,"
all of another are my "wives," and so on. Thus Mr. Spencer is able
to say that "individual marriage does not exist either in name or in
practice in the Urabunna tribe" at the present day.[4]

This, however, does not mean that among many such tribes a man is not
betrothed to a special woman, and does not marry that woman, with
certain filthy initiatory "rites," contravening the usual rules of
intercourse.[5] Nor is it denied that such man and wife habitually
cohabit, and that the man, by hunting and fishing, provides for the
wife and all her children, and recognises them as his own.

It is meant that each man has only a certain set of nubile women
open to him (_Nupa_, or _Noa_, or _Unawa_), and that out of these,
in addition to his allotted bride, an uncertain number of women are
assigned to him and to others, mainly at tribal festivals, as paramours
(_Pirauru_ or _Piraungaru_), by their elder brothers, or the heads of
totem kins, or the seniors of the Urabunna tribe. "This relationship
is usually established at times when considerable numbers of the tribe
are gathered together to perform important ceremonies."[6] One woman
may, on different occasions, be allotted as _Piraungaru_ to different
men, one man to different women. Occasionally, though rarely, the
regular husband (he who marries the wife by filthy "rites") resists the
allotting of his wife to another man, and then "there is a fight."

The question is, does this Urabunna custom of _Piraungaru_ (the
existence of which in some tribes is not denied) represent a survival
of a primary stage in which all men of a certain social and phratriac
status were all alike husbands to all women of the corresponding status
(group, or rather _status_, marriage); and was _that_, in turn, a
survival of the anarchy of the horde, in which there were no grades at
all, but anarchic promiscuity?

That is the opinion of believers in "the primary undivided horde," and
in "group marriage," or rather "status marriage."

Or is this _Piraungaru_ custom, as we think more probable, an organised
and circumscribed and isolated legalisation, among a few tribes, of
the utterly unbridled license practised by many savages on festive
occasions corresponding to the Persian feast of the Sacaea, and to the
Roman Saturnalia?[7]

The _Piraungaru_ allotments are made, as a rule, at great licentious
meetings, but among the Urabunna, though they break the rules
of individual marriage, they do not break the tribal rules of
incest. By these rules the _Piraungaru_ men and women must be legal
intermarriageable persons (_Nupa_); their regulated paramourship is
not, by tribal law, what we, or the natives, deem "incestuous." On the
other hand, at Fijian seasons of license, even the relationship of
brother and sister--the most sacred of all to a savage--is purposely
profaned. Brothers and sisters are "intentionally coupled" at the feast
of license called _Nanga_. The object is to have "a regular burst,"
and deliberately violate every law. Men and women "publicly practised
unmentionable abominations."[8]

The Fijians are infinitely above the Urabunna in civilisation, being an
agricultural people. Their Nanga feast is also called Mbaki--"harvest"
Yet the Fijians, though more civilised, far exceed the license of
the _Piraungaru_ custom of the Urabunna, not only permitting, but
enjoining, the extremest form of incest.

The Arunta, again, neighbours of the Urabunna, though said to have
more of "individual marriage" than they, in seasons of license go
much beyond the Urabunna, though not so far as the Fijians. Women, at
certain large meetings, "are told off ... and with the exception of
men who stand in the relation of actual Uther, brother, or sons, they
are, for the time being, common property to _all_ the men present on
the corroboree ground." Women are thus handed over to men "whom, under
ordinary circumstances, they may not even speak to or go near."[9]
Every known rule, except that which forbids the closest incest as
understood by ourselves, is deliberately and purposely reversed[10]
by the Arunta on certain occasions. Another example will be produced
later, that of the Dieri, neighbours of the Urabunna.

We suggest, then, that these three grades of license--the Urabunna,
adulterous, but more or less permanent, and limited by rules and
by tribal and modern laws of incest; the Arunta, not permanent,
adulterous, and tribally incestuous, limited only by our own ideas of
the worst kinds of incest; and the Fijian, not permanent, adulterous,
and of an incestuous character not only unlimited by laws, but rather
limited by the desire to break the most sacred laws--are all of the
same kind. They are not, we suggest, survivals of "group marriage," or
of a period of perfect promiscuity in everyday life, though that they
commemorate such a fancied period is the Arunta myth, just as the Roman
myth averred that the Saturnalia commemorated the anarchy of the Golden
Age.

                  "In Saturn's time
Such mixture was not held a crime."

The Golden Age of promiscuity is, of course, reported, not in an
historical tradition recording a fact, but in a myth invented to
explain the feasts of license. Men find that they have institutions,
they argue that they must once have been without institutions, they
make myths about ancestors or gods who introduced institutions, they
invent the Golden Age, when there were none, and, on occasion, revert
for a day or a week to that happy ideal. The periods of license cannot
be true commemorative functions, continued in pious memory of a time of
anarchy since institutions began.

But of the three types, Urabunna, Arunta, Fijian, the Urabunna, except
in its degree of permanence, is the least licentious, least invades
law, and it is a curious question why incest increases at these feasts
as culture advances, up to a certain point. The law invaded by the
Urabunna _Piraungaru_ custom is not the tribal law of incest, nor
the modern law of incest, but the law of the sanctity of individual
marriage. It may therefore be argued (as against my own opinion) that
the sanctity of individual marriage is still merely a nascent idea
among the Urabunna, an idea which is recent, and so can be set aside
easily; whereas the tribal laws of incest are strong with the strength
of immemorial antiquity, and therefore must have already existed in a
past age when there was no individual marriage at all. On this showing
we have, first, the communal undivided horde; next, the horde bisected
into groups which must not marry within each other (phratries), though
_why_ this arrangement was made and submitted to nobody can guess with
any plausibility. By this time all females of phratry A might not only
marry any man of phratry B, but were, according to the hypothesis, by
theory and by practice, _all_ wives of _all_ men of phratry B. Next, as
to-day, a man of B married a woman of A, with or without the existing
offensive rites, but his tenure of her is still so insecure and recent
that it is set aside, to a great extent, by the _Piraungaru_ or
_Pirauru_ custom, itself a proof and survival of "group marriage," and
of communal promiscuity in the past. Such is the argument for "group
marriage," which may be advanced against my opinion, or thus, if I did
not hold my opinion, I would state the argument.

This licentious custom, whether called _Piraungaru_ or by other names,
is, with the tribal names for human relationships, the only basis of
the belief in the primal promiscuous horde. Now, as to these names of
relationships, we may repeat the adverse arguments already advanced by
us in _Social Origins_, pp. 99-103. "Whatever the original sense of
the names, they all now denote seniority and customary legal status in
the tribe, with the reciprocal duties, rights, and avoidances.... The
friends of group and communal marriage keep unconsciously forgetting,
at this point of their argument, that _our_ ideas of sister, brother,
father, mother, and so on, have nothing to do (as they tell us at
certain other points of their argument) with the native terms,
which _include_, indeed, but do not _denote_ these relationships as
understood by us.... We cannot say 'our word "son" must not be thought
of when we try to understand the native term of relationship which
includes sons--in _our_ sense,' and next aver that 'sons, in _our_
sense, are regarded [or spoken of] as real sons of the group, not of
the individual, because of a past [or present] stage of promiscuity
which made real paternity undiscoverable.'"

Manifestly there lurks a fallacy in alternately using "sons," for
example, in our sense, and then in the tribal sense, which includes
both fatherhood, or sonship, in our sense, and also tribal status and
duties. "The terms, in addition to their usual and generally accepted
signification of relationship by blood, express a class or group
relation quite independent of it."[11]

Thus the tribal names may result from an expanded use of earlier names
of blood relationship, or names of tribal status may now be applied
to include persons who are within degrees of blood relationship. In
the latter case, how do we know that a tribe with its degrees of
status is primitive? Starcke thinks that Mr. Morgan's use of terms of
relationship as proof of "communal marriage" is "a wild dream, if not
the delirium of fever." "The nomenclature was in every respect the
faithful reflection of the juridical relations which arose between
the nearest kinsfolk of each tribe. Individuals who were, according
to the legal point of view, on the same level with the speaker,
received the same designation. The other categories of kinship were
formally developed out of this standpoint." The system of names for
relationships "affords no warrant" for Mr. Morgan's theory of primitive
promiscuity.[12]

Similar arguments against inferring collective marriage in the
past from existing tribal terms of relationship are urged by Dr.
Durkheim.[13] He writes, taking an American case of names of
relationship, as against Professor Kohler: "We see that the (Choctaw)
word _Inoha_ (mother) applies indifferently to all the women of my
mother's group, from the oldest to the youngest. The term thus defines
its own meaning: it applies to all the women of the family (or clan?)
into which my father has married. Doubtless it is rather hard to
understand how the same term can apply to so many different people.
But certain it is, that the word cannot awake, in men's minds, any
idea of _descent_, in the usual sense of the word. For a man cannot
seriously regard his second cousin as his mother, even virtual. _The
vocabulary of relationships must therefore express something other
than relations of consanguinity, properly so-called...._ Relationship
and consanguinity are very different things ... relationship being
essentially constituted by certain legal and moral obligations, which
society imposes on certain individuals."[14]

The whole passage should be read, but its sense is that which I have
already tried to express; and Dr. Durkheim says, "The hypothesis of
collective marriage has never been more than an _ultima ratio_" (a last
resource), "intended to enable us to envisage these strange customs;
but it is impossible to overlook all the difficulties which it raises."

An analogous explanation of the wide use of certain terms of
relationship has been given by Dr. Fison, of whom Mr. Howitt writes,
"Much of what I have done is equally his."[15] Dr. Fison says, "All
men of the same generation who bear the same totem are tribally
brothers, though they may belong to different and widely separated
tribes. Here we find an explanation of certain apparently anomalous
terms of relationship. Thus, in some tribes the paternal grandson
and his grandfather call one another 'elder brother' and 'younger
brother' respectively. These persons are of the same totem."[16] "Many
other designations" in Mr. Morgan's Tables of Terms of Relationship
"admit of a similar solution."[17] The terms do not denote degrees of
blood relationship, but of brotherhood in the totem (or phratry, or
matrimonial class). It is so, too, with the Choctaw term for Mother.
Every one knows who his mother, in our sense, is: the Choctaw term
denotes a tribal status.

If it be said that, because a man calls his wife his _Noa_, and also
calls all women whom he might have married his _Noa_, therefore all
these women, in past times, would have been his wives; it might as
well be said that all the women whom he calls "mother" would, in times
past, have collaborated in giving birth to him. As far as these terms
indicate relationship, "a man is the younger brother of his maternal
grandmother," and the maternal grandfather of his second cousin![18]
The terms do not denote relationship in blood, clearly, but something
quite different.

The custom of _Piraungaru_, or _Pirrauru_, and cases of license at
festivals, and the names for tribal relations, are, we repeat, the
only arguments in favour of the theory of the communal horde.[19] We
have shown that the terms of relationship do not necessarily help the
theory. That theory, again, is invalidated by its inability to account
for the origin of the rules forbidding marriage between persons of the
same phratry (for it does not tell us _why_ the original medicine man
conceived the idea of regulations), or even to account for the origin
of the phratriac divisions.

But why, on our system, can the _Piraungaru_ custom break the rule of
individual marriage more easily than the law prohibiting incest? Why it
can do so on the theory of pristine promiscuity we have explained (p.
41, _supra_).

We reply that individual marriage has not, among savages, any
"religious" sanction; it is protected by no form of the phratry or
totem tabu; by no god, such as Hymen; but rests, as from the first it
rested, on the character and strength of the possessor of the woman or
women, and falls into abeyance if he does not choose to exert it. If
the males of the Urabunna have so far departed from the natural animal
instincts as usually (with exceptions) to prefer to relax their tenure
of women, being tempted by the bribe of a legalised change of partners
all round, they exhibit, not a primitive, but a rather advanced type of
human nature. The moral poet sings:--

"Of _Whist_ or _Cribbage_ mark the amusing Game,
The _Partners_ changing, but the _Sport_ the same,
Then see one Man with one unceasing Wife,
Play the long Rubber of connubial Life."[20]

This is the "platform" of the Urabunna and Dieri, as it is of the
old Cicisbeism in Italy, and of a section of modern "smart society,"
especially at the end of the _ancien régime_ in France. Man may fall
into this way of thinking, just as, in Greece, he actually legalised
unnatural passions by a ceremony of union. "That one practice, in many
countries, became systematised," as Mr. J. F. McLennan wrote to Mr.
Darwin.[21]

This is not the only example of a legalised aberration from nature,
or from second nature. Abhorrence of incest has become a law of
second nature, among savage as among civilised men. But Dr. Durkheim
publishes a long list of legalised aberrations from the laws of incest
among Hebrews, Arabs, Phœnicians, Greeks, Slavonic peoples, Medes,
Persians, Egyptians, Cambodians, and Peruvians.[22] If these things,
these monstrous aberrations, can be legalised "in the green tree," why
should not jealousy fall into a kind of legalised abeyance among the
Urabunna, under the law of partner-shifting? The _Piraungaru_ custom
does not prove that earliest man was not ferociously jealous; it merely
shows that certain tribes have reached a stage in which jealousy is, at
present, more or less suppressed in favour of legalised license.

We catch the Urabunna and Dieri at a moment of development in which
the abandonment of strict possession of a wife is compensated for by
a legalised system of changing partners, enduring after the feast of
license is over. But even so, a man is responsible, as father, for the
children of his actual wife, not for the children of his _Piraungaru_
paramours. For these their actual husbands (_Tippa Malku_) are
responsible.

Mr. Howitt says, in his earlier account of this institution, that among
the Dieri, neighbours of the Urabunna, the men and women who are made
_Pirauru_ are not consulted. The heads of the tribe do not ask whether
they fancy each other or not. "The time is one of festivity, feasting,
and amusement," only too obviously! "Dancing is carried on." "A man
can always exercise marital rights towards his _Pirauru_, if they
meet when her _Noa_ (real husband) is absent, but he cannot take her
away from him unless by his consent," except at the feasts. But the
husband usually consents. "In spite of all this arrangement, most of
the quarrels among the Dieri arise out of this _Pirauru_ practice....
"A son or daughter regards the real husband (_Noa_) of his mother as
his _Apiri Muria_, or "real father"; his mother's _Pirauru_ is only his
_Apiri Waka_, or "little father." At certain feasts of license, such
as intertribal marriages, "no jealous feeling is allowed under penalty
of strangling, but it crops up afterwards, and occasions many bloody
affrays."[23] Thus jealousy is not easily kept in abeyance by customary
law.

The idea of such a change of partners is human, not animal, and the
more of a brute the ancestor of man was the less could he dream, in
times truly primitive, of _Piraungaru_ as a permanent arrangement. Men,
in a few tribes, declined into it, and are capable of passing out of
it, like the Urabunna or Dieri man, who either retains so much of the
animal, or is rising so far towards the Homeric standard, as to fight
rather than let his wife be allotted to another man, or at least to
thump that other man afterwards.

The Dieri case of the feast of license, just mentioned, is notable.
"The various _Piraurus_ (paramours) are allotted to each other by
the great council of the tribe, after which their names are formally
announced to the assembled people on the evening of the ceremony of
circumcision, during which there is for a time a general license
permitted between all those who have been thus allotted to each other."
But persons of the same totem among the Dieri may not be _Piraurus_
to each other, nor may near relations as we reckon kinship, including
cousins on both sides.

In this arrangement Mr. Howitt sees "a form of group marriage," while
I see tribe-regulated license, certainly much less lawless than that
of the more advanced Fijians or the Arunta. Mr. Howitt did not state
that the _Pirauru_ or _Piraungaru_ unions are preceded (as marriage is)
by any ceremony, unless the reading the banns, so to speak, by public
proclamation among the Dieri is a ceremony.[24] Now he has discovered a
ceremony as symbolic as our wedding ring (1904).

Little light, if any, is thrown on these customs of legalised license
by philology. Mr. Howitt thought that _Pirauru_ may be derived from
_Pira_, "the moon," and _Uru_, "circular." The tribal feasts of
license are held at the full moon, but I am not aware that, by the
natives, people are deemed peculiarly "moonstruck," or lunatic, at
that season. If Urabunna _Piraungaru_ is linguistically connected with
Dieri _Pirauru_, then both _Piraungaru_ and _Pirauru_ may mean "Full
Mooners." "Thy full moons and thy festivals are an abomination to
me!"[25]

Among the Dieri, "a woman becomes the _Noa_ of a man most frequently by
being betrothed to him when she is a mere infant.... In certain cases
she is given by the Great Council, as a reward for some meritorious
act on his part." "None but the brave deserve the fair," and this is
"individual marriage," though the woman who is wedded to one man may be
legally allotted as Full Mooner, or _Pirauru_, to several. "The right
of the _Noa_ overrides that of the _Pirauru_. Thus a man cannot claim
a woman who is _Pirauru_ to him when her _Noa_ is present in the camp,
excepting by his consent." The husband generally yields, he shares
equivalent privileges. "Such cases, however, are the frequent causes of
jealousies and fights."[26]

This evidence does not seem, on the whole, to force upon us the
conclusion that the Urabunna _Piraungaru_ custom, or any of these
customs, any more than the custom of polyandry, or of legalised
incest in higher societies, is a survival of "group marriage"--all
men of certain social grades being actual husbands of all women of
the corresponding grades--while again that is a survival of gradeless
promiscuity. We shall disprove that theory. Rather, the _Piraungaru_
custom appears to be a limited concession to the taste, certainly a
human taste, for partner-changing--_which can only manifest itself
where regular partnerships already exist_. Jealousy among these tribes
is in a state of modified abeyance: like nature herself, and second
nature, where, among civilised peoples, things unnatural, or contrary
to the horror of incest, have been systematically legalised.

I have so far given Mr. Howitt's account of _Pirrauru_ (the name is now
so written by him) among the Dieri, as it appeared in his works, prior
to 1904. In that year he published his _Native Tribes of South-East
Australia_, which contains additional details of essential importance
(pp. 179-187). A woman becomes _Tippa Malku_,[27] or affianced,[28]
to one man only, _before_ she becomes _Pirrauru_, or what Mr. Howitt
calls a "group wife." A "group wife," I think, no woman becomes. She
is never the _Pirrauru_ of all the men who are _Noa_ to her, that is,
intermarriageable with her. She is merely later allotted, after a
symbolic ceremony, as a _Pirrauru_ to one or more men, who are _Noa_
to her. At first, while a child, or at least while a maiden, she is
betrothed (there are varieties of modes) to one individual male. She
may ask her husband to let her take on another man as _Pirrauru_;
"should he refuse to do this she must put up with it." If he consents,
other men make two adjacent ridges of sand, and level them into one
larger ridge, while a man, usually the selected lover, pours sand from
the ridge over the upper part of his thighs, "buries the _Pirrauru_ in
the sand." (The phrase does not suggest that _Pirrauru_ means "Full
Mooners.") This is the Kandri ceremony, it is performed when men swop
wives (exchange their _Noa_ as _Pirraurus_), and also when "the whole
of the marriageable or married people, even those who are already
_Pirrauru_, are _reallotted_," a term which suggests the temporary
character of the unions.

I am ready to allow that the _Kandri_ ceremony, a symbol of recognised
union, like our wedding ring, or the exchanged garlands of the Indian
_Ghandarva_ rite, constitutes, in a sense, marriage, or a qualified
union recognised by public opinion. But it is a form of union which
is arranged subsequent to the _Tippa Malku_ ceremony of permanent
betrothal and wedlock. Moreover, it is, without a shadow of doubt,
subsequent in time and in evolution to the "specialising" of one
woman to one man in the _Tippa Malku_ arrangement. That arrangement
is demonstrably more primitive than _Pirrauru_, for _Pirrauru_ is
unthinkable, except as a later (and isolated) custom in modification of
_Tippa Malku_.

This can easily be proved. On Mr. Howitt's theory, "group marriage"
(I prefer to say "status marriage") came next after promiscuity. All
persons legally intermarriageable (_Noa_), under phratry law, were
originally, he holds, _ipso facto_, married. Consequently the _Kandri_
custom could not make them _more_ married than they then actually were.
In no conceivable way could it widen the area of their matrimonial
comforts, unless it enabled them to enjoy partners who were not
_Noa_, not legally intermarriageable with them. But this the _Kandri_
ceremony does not do. All that it does is to permit certain persons
who are already _Tippa Malku_ (wedded) to each other, to acquire legal
paramours in certain other wedded or _Tippa Malku_ women, and in men
either married or bachelors. Thus, except as a legalised modification
of individual _Tippa Malku_, _Pirrauru_ is impossible, and its
existence is unthinkable.[29]

_Pirrauru_ is a modification of marriage (_Tippa Malku_), _Tippa
Malku_ is not a modification of "group marriage." If it were, a
_Tippa Malku_ husband, "specialising" (as Mr. Howitt says) a woman to
himself, would need to ask the leave of his fellows, who are Noa to his
intended _fiancée_.[30] The reverse is the case. A man cannot take his
_Pirrauru_ woman away from her _Tippa Malku_ husband "unless by his
consent, excepting at certain ceremonial times"--feasts, in fact, of
license. _Pirrauru_ secures the domestic peace, more or less, of the
seniors, by providing the young men (who otherwise would be wifeless
and desperate) with legalised lemans. By giving these _Pirrauru_ "in
commendation" to the young men, older men increase their property
and social influence. What do the _Tippa Malku_ husbands say to this
arrangement?

As for "group" marriage, there is nothing of the kind; no group
marries another group, the _Pirrauru_ literally heap hot coals on
each other if they suspect that their mate is taking another of the
"group" as _Pirrauru_. The jealous, at feasts of license, are strangled
(_Nulina_). The Rev. Otto Siebert, a missionary among the Dieri,
praises _Pirrauru_ for "its earnestness in regard to morality." One
does not quite see that hiring out one's paramours, who are other men's
wives, to a third set of men is earnestly moral, or that jealousy,
checked by strangling in public, by hot coals in private, is edifying,
but _Pirrauru_ is not "group marriage." No pre-existing group is
involved. _Pirrauru may_ (if they like jealousy and hot coals) live
together in a group, or the men and women may often live far remote
from each other, and meet only at bean-feasts.

You may call _Pirrauru_ a form of "marriage," if you like, but, as a
later modification of a prior _Tippa Malku_ wedlock, it cannot be cited
as a proof of a yet more pristine status-marriage of all male to all
female intermarriageable persons, which supposed state of affairs is
called "group marriage."[31]

If _Pirrauru_ were primitive, it might be looked for among these
southern and eastern tribes which, with the pristine social
organisation of the Urabunna and their congeners, lack the more recent
institutions of circumcision, subincision, totemic magic, possess the
All Father belief, but not the belief in prehuman predecessors, or,
at least, in their constant reincarnation. (This last is not a Dieri
belief.) But among these primitive south-east tribes, _Pirrauru_ is
no more found than subincision. Nor is it found among the Arunta
and the northern tribes. It is an isolated "sport" among the Dieri,
Urabunna, and their congeners. Being thus isolated, _Pirrauru_ cannot
claim to be a necessary step in evolution from "group marriage" to
"individual marriage." It may, however, though the point is uncertain,
prevail, or have prevailed, "among all the tribes between Port Lincoln
and the Yerkla-mining at Eucla," that is, wherever the Dieri and
Urabunna phratry names, _Matteri_ and _Kararu_, exist.[32] Having
identical phratry names (or one phratry name identical, as among the
Kunandaburi), whether by borrowing or by original community of language
and institutions: all these tribes southward to the sea from Lake Eyre
may possess, or may have possessed, _Pirrauru_.

Among the most pristine of all tribes, in the south by east, however,
_Pirrauru_ is not found. When we reach the Wiimbaio, the Geawe-gal, the
Kuinmarbura, the Wakelbura, and the Narrang-ga, we find no _Pirrauru_.
But Mr. Howitt notes other practices which are taken by him to be mere
rudimentary survivals of "group marriage." They are (i.) exchange of
wives at feasts of marriage, or in view of impending misfortune, as
when shipwrecked mariners break into the stores, and are "working at
the rum and the gin." These are feasts of license, not survivals of
"group marriage" nor of _Pirrauru_. (ii.) The _jus primae noctis_,
enjoyed by men of the bridegroom's totem. This is not marriage at all,
nor is it a survival of _Pirrauru_. (iii.) Very rare "saturnalia,"
"almost promiscuous." This is neither "group marriage" (being almost
promiscuous and very rare) nor _Pirrauru_. (iv.) Seven brothers have
one wife. This is adelphic polyandry, Mr. Howitt calls it "group
marriage." (v.) "A man had the right to exchange his wife for the wife
of another man, but the practice was not looked upon favourably by the
clan." If this is "group marriage" (there is no "group" concerned)
there was group marriage in ancient Rome.[33] This, I think, is all
that Mr. Howitt has to show for "group marriage" and _Pirrauru_ among
the tribes most retentive of primitive usages.

The manner in which _Tippa Malku_ betrothals are arranged deserves
attention. They who "give this woman away," and they who give away her
bride-groom also, are the brothers of the mothers of the pair, or the
mothers themselves may arrange the matter.[34]

Mr. Howitt, on this point, observes that, if the past can be judged of
by the present, "I should say that the practice of betrothal, which
is universal in Australia, must have produced a feeling of individual
proprietary right over the women so promised." Manifestly Mr. Howitt
is putting the plough before the oxen. It is because certain kinsfolk
have an acknowledged "proprietary right" over the woman that they can
betroth her to a man: it is not because they can betroth her to a man
that they have "a feeling of individual proprietary right over her."
I give my coppers away to a crossing-sweeper, or exchange them for
commodities, because I have an individual proprietary right over these
coins. I have not acquired the feeling of individual proprietary right
over the pence by dint of observing that I do give them away or buy
things with them.

The proprietary rights of mothers, maternal uncles, or any other
kinsfolk over girls must, of course, have been existing and generally
acknowledged before these kinsfolk could exercise the said rights of
giving away. But, in a promiscuous horde, before marriage existed, how
could anybody know what persons had proprietary rights over what other
persons?[35]

Mr. Howitt here adds that the "practice of betrothal ..." (or perhaps
he means that "the feeling of individual proprietary right"?) "when
accentuated by the _Tippa Malku_ marriage, must also tend to overthrow
the _Pirrauru_ marriage." Of course we see, on the other hand, and have
proved, that if there were no _Tippa Malku_ marriage there could be no
_Pirrauru_ to overthrow.

As to the _Pirrauru_ or _Piraungaru_ custom, moreover, Mr. Howitt
has himself candidly observed that, on his theory, it "ought rather
to have been perpetuated than abandoned" (so it _is_ abandoned)
"under conditions of environment" (such as more abundant food) "which
permitted the _Pirrauru_ group to remain together on one spot,
instead of being compelled by the exigencies of existence to separate
into lesser groups having the Noa" (or regular) "marriage."[36] So
_Pirrauru_ don't live in "groups"!

As a fact, the more that supplies, in some regions, as on the south
coast, permit relatively large groups to coexist, the less is their
marital license; while, on the other hand, the less favourable the
conditions of supply (as in the Barkinji region), the less do we hear
of _Pirrauru_, or anything of the kind, except among tribes of the
Kiraru and Matteri phratries. For these reasons, _Pirrauru_ unions
appear to mark an isolated moment in culture, not to be a survival of
universal pristine promiscuity. They are almost always associated,
in their inception, with seasons of frolic and lust, and with large
assemblages, rather than with the usual course of everyday existence.

For the reasons here stated, it does not seem that Australian
institutions yield any evidence for primitive promiscuity.

[1] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 89.

[2] Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 90.

[3] _Loc. cit._ Mr. Howitt says "classes," but we adhere to the term
"phratries."

[4] _Natives of Central Australia_, Spencer and Gillen, p. 63.

[5] Spencer and Gillen, pp. 92-98.

[6] _Natives of Central Australia_, Spencer and Gillen, p. 63.

[7] For a large account of these customs see _The Golden Bough_, second
edition.

[8] Fison, J.A.I., xiv. p. 28.

[9] _Natives of Central Australia_, Spencer and Gillen, p. 97.

[10] Ibid., p. 111.

[11] Roth, _N.W.C. Queensland Aborigines_, p. 56.

[12] Starcke, _The Primitive Family_, p. 207.

[13] _L'Année Sociologique_, i. pp. 313-316.

[14] _L'Année Sociologique_, i. p. 315.

[15] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, xiv.

[16] Can Dr. Fison mean of the same matrimonial class?

[17] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, pp. 166, 167.

[18] _Native Races of South-East Australia_, p. 163. Pointed out by Mr.
N. W. Thomas.

[19] The participation of many men in the _jus primae noctis_ is open
to various explanations.

[20] _Poetry of the Antijacobin._

[21] _Studies in Ancient History_, ii. p. 52.

[22] _L'Année Sociologique_, i., pp.38, 39, 62.

[23] _J. A. I._, pp. 56-60, August 1890.

[24] Howitt, _J. A. I._, August 1890, pp. 55-58.

[25] What the Dieri call _Pirauru_ (legalised paramour) the adjacent
Kunan-daburi tribe call _Dilpa Mali_. In this tribe the individual
husband or individual wife (that is, the real wife or husband) is
styled _Nubaia_, in Dieri _Noa_, in Urabunna _Nupa_. Husband's brother,
sister's husband, wife's sister, and brother's wife are all _Nubaia
Kodimali_ in Kunandabori, and are all _Noa_ in Dieri. What _Dilpa
Mali_ (legalised paramour, or "accessory wife or husband") means in
Kunandabori Mr. Howitt does not know. But he learns that _Kodi Mali_
(applied to _Pirauru_) means "_not_ Nubaia," that is, "_not_ legal
individual husband or wife." If we knew what Dilpa means in Dilpa Mali
(legalised paramour of either sex), we should know more than we are apt
to do in the present state of Australian philology.

At Port Lincoln a man calls his own wife _Yung Ara_, that of his
brother _Karteti_ (_Trans. Phil. Soc. Vic._, v. 180). What do these
words mean?--_Report of Regents of Smithsonian Institute_, 1883, pp.
804-806.

[26] _Report of Regents of Smithsonian Institute_, 1883, p. 807.

[27] _Tippa_, in one tongue, _Malku_ in another, denote the tassel
which is a man's full dress suit.

[28] Mr. Howitt says that the pair are _Tippa Malku_ "for the time
being" (p. 179), though the association seems to be permanent. May
girls Tippa Malku--"sealed" to a man--have relations with other men
before their actual marriage, and with what men? We are not told, but a
girl cannot be a _Pirrauru_ before she is _Tippa Malku_. If _Pirrauru_
"arises through the exchange by brothers of their _wives_" (p. 181),
how can an unmarried man who has no wife become a _Pirrauru_? He
does. When _Pirrauru_ people are "re-allotted" (p. 182), does the old
connection persist, or is it broken, or is it merely in being for the
festive occasion? How does the jealousy of the _Pirrauru_, which is
great, like the change? These questions, and many more, are asked by
Mr. N. W. Thomas.

[29] Will any one say, originally all Noa people were actual husbands
and wives to each other? Then the Kandri ceremony and _Pirrauru_
were devised to limit Tom, Dick, and Harry, &c., to Jane, Mary, and
Susan, &c., all these men being _Pirrauru_ to all these women, and
_vice versa_. Next, Tippa Malku was devised, limiting Jane to Tom,
but _Pirrauru_ was retained, to modify that limitation. Anybody is
welcome to this mode of making _Pirrauru_ logically thinkable, without
prior _Tippa Malku_: if he thinks that the arrangement is logically
thinkable, which I do not.

[30] Or his seniors would hare to ask it. But his kin could not possess
the tight to betroth him before kinship was recognised, which, before
marriage existed, it could not be.

[31] I have here had the advantage of using a MS. note by Mr. N. W.
Thomas.

[32] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 191.

[33] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 195, 217, 219, 224,
260.

[34] _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 177, 178.

[35] Ibid., p. 283.

[36] _J. A. I._, xiii. p. 34.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARUNTA ANOMALY

      How could man, if promiscuous, cease to be so?--Opinion
      of Mr. Howitt--Ethical training in groups very small, by
      reason of economic conditions--Likes and dislikes--Love
      and jealousy--Distinctions and restrictions--Origin of
      restrictions not explained by Professor Spencer--His
      account of the Arunta--Among them the totem does not
      regulate marriage, is not exogamous, denotes a magical
      society--Causes of this unique state of things--Male
      descent: doctrine of reincarnation, belief in
      spirit-haunted stone _churinga nanja_--Mr. Spencer thinks
      Arunta totemism pristine--This opinion contested--How
      Arunta totemism ceased to regulate marriage--Result
      of isolated belief in _churinga nanja_--Contradictory
      Arunta myths--Arunta totemism impossible in tribes
      with female descent--Case of the Urabunna--Origin of
      _churinga nanja_ belief--Sacred stone objects in New
      South Wales--Present Arunta belief perhaps based on myths
      explanatory of stone amulets of unknown meaning--Proof
      that the more northern tribes never held the Arunta belief
      in _churinga nanja_--Traces of Arunta ideas among the
      Euahlayi--Possible traces of a belief in a sky-dwelling
      being among southern Arunta--Mr. Gillen's "great Ulthaana
      of the heavens"--How arose the magic-working animal-named
      Arunta societies?--Not found in the south-east--Mr.
      Spencer's theory that they do survive--Criticism of his
      evidence--Recapitulation--Arunta totemism not primitive
      but modified.

Next we have to ask how, granting the hypothesis of the promiscuous
horde, man ceased to be promiscuous. It will be seen that, on a theory
of Mr. Howitt's, man was, in fact, far on the way of ceasing to be
promiscuous or a "horde's man," before he introduced the moral reform
of bisecting his horde into phratries, for the purpose of preventing
brother with sister marriages. Till unions were permanent, and kin
recognised, things impossible in a state of promiscuity, nobody could
dream of forbidding brother and sister marriage, because nobody could
know who was brother or sister to whom. Now, Mr. Howitt does indicate
a way in which man might cease to be promiscuous, before any sage
invented the system of exogamous phratries.

He writes,[1] "I start ... from the assumption that there was once an
undivided commune ... I do not desire to be understood as maintaining
that it implies necessarily the assumption of complete communism
between the sexes. Assuming that the former physical conditions of the
Australian continent were much as they are now, complete communism
always existing would, I think, be an impossibility. The character of
the country, the necessity of hunting for food, and of removing from
one spot to another in search of game and of vegetable food, would
necessarily cause any undivided commune, _when it assumed dimensions of
more than that of a few members, to break up_, under the necessities
of existence, into two or more communes of similar constitution to
itself. In addition to this it has become evident to me, after a long
acquaintance with the Australian savage, that, in the past as now,
individual likes and dislikes must have existed; so that, although
there was the admitted common right between certain groups of the
commune, in practice these rights would either not be exercised by
reason of various causes, or would remain in abeyance, so far as the
separated but allied undivided communes were concerned, until on great
ceremonial occasions, or where certain periodical gatherings for
food purposes reunited temporarily all the segments of the original
community. In short, so far as the evidence goes at present, I am
inclined to regard the probable condition of the undivided commune as
being well represented now by what occurs when on certain occasions the
modified divided communes reunite."[2]

What occurs in these festive assemblies among certain central and
northern tribes, as we have seen, is a legalised and restricted change
of wives all round, with disregard, in some cases, of some of the
tribal rules against incest. On Mr. Howitt's theory the undivided
communal horde must always have been, as I have urged, dividing itself,
owing to lack of supplies. It would be a very small group, continually
broken up, and intercourse of the sexes even in that group, must
have been restrained by jealousy, based on the asserted existence of
individual "likes" and "dislikes." These restrictions, again, must have
led to some idea that the man usually associated with, and responsible
for feeding, and protecting, and correcting the woman and her children,
was just the man who "liked" her, the man whom she "liked," and the man
who "disliked" other men if they wooed her.

But that state of things is not an undivided communal horde at all! It
is much more akin to the state of things in which I take marriage rules
to have arisen.

We may suppose, then, that early moral distinctions and restrictions
grew up among the practically "family" groups of everyday life, as
described by Mr. Howitt, and we need not discuss again the question
whether, at this very early period, there existed a community exactly
like the local tribe of to-day in every respect--except that marriage
was utterly unregulated, till an inspired medicine man promulgated the
law of exogamy, his own invention.

Mr. Howitt began his long and invaluable studies of these problems as
a disciple of Mr. Lewis Morgan. That scholar was a warm partisan of
the primeval horde, of group marriage, and (at times) of a reformatory
movement. These ideas, first admitted to Mr. Howitt's mind, have
remained with him, but he has seen clearly that the whole theory needed
at least that essential modification which his practical knowledge of
savage life has enabled him to make. He does not seem to me to hold
that the promiscuous horde suddenly, for no reason, reformed itself:
his reformers had previous ethical training in a state of daily life
which is not that of the hypothetical horde. But he still clings to the
horde, tiny as it must have been, as the source of a tradition of a
brief-lived period of promiscuity. This faith is but the "after-image"
left in his mental processes by the glow of Mr. Morgan's theory, but
the faith is confirmed by his view of the terms of relationship, and of
the _Piraungaru_, _Pirrauru_, and similar customs. We have shown, in
the last chapter, that the terms and the customs are not necessarily
proofs of promiscuity in the past, but may be otherwise interpreted
with logical consistency, and in conformity with human nature.

The statement of Mr. Howitt shows how the communal horde of the
hypothesis might come to see that it needed moral reformation. In
daily life, by Mr. Howitt's theory, it had practically ceased to be a
communal horde before the medicine man was inspired to reform it. The
hypothesis of Professor Baldwin Spencer resembles that of Mr. Howitt,
but, unlike his (as it used to stand), accounts for the existence
of animal-named sets of people within the phratries. Mr. Spencer,
starting from the present social condition of the Arunta "nation" or
group of tribes (Arunta, Kaitish, Ilpirra, Unmatjera), supposes that
these tribes retain pristine traits, once universal, but now confined
to them. The peculiar pristine traits, by the theory, are (1) the
existence of animal-named local societies for magical purposes. The
members of each local group worked magic for their name-giving animal
or plant, but any one might marry a woman of his own group name, Eagle
Hawk, Cockatoo, and the like, while these names were not inherited,
either from father or mother, and did not denote a bond of kinship.
Mr. Spencer, then, supposes the horde to have been composed of such
magical societies, at a very remote date, before sexual relations were
regulated by any law. Later, in some fashion, and for some reason
which Mr. Spencer does not profess to explain, "there was felt the
need of some form of organisation, and this gradually resulted in the
development of exogamous groups."[3] These "exogamous groups," among
the Arunta, are now the four or eight "matrimonial classes," as among
other tribes of northern Australia. These tribes, as a rule, have
phratries, but the Arunta have lost even the phratry names.

Mr. Spencer's theory thus explains the existence of animal-named
groups--as co-operative magical societies, for breeding the animals or
plants--but does not explain how exogamy arose, or why, everywhere,
except among the Arunta, all the animal or plant named sets of people
are kinships, and are exogamous, while they are neither the one or
the other among the Arunta. Either the Arunta groups have once been
exogamous totem kinships, and have ceased to be so, becoming magical
societies; or such animal-named sets of people have, everywhere, first
been magical societies, and later become exogamous totem kinships. Mr.
Spencer holds the latter view, we hold the former, believing that the
Arunta have once been in the universal state of totemic exogamy, and
that, by a perfectly intelligible process, their animal-named groups
have become magical societies, no longer exogamous kinships. We can
show how the old exogamous totem kinship, among the Arunta, became
a magical society, not regulating sexual relations; but we cannot
imagine how all totemic mankind, if they began with magical societies
in an unregulated horde, should have everywhere, except among the
Arunta, conspired to convert these magical societies into kinships
with exogamy. If the social organisation of the Arunta were peculiarly
primitive, if their beliefs and ceremonials were of the most archaic
type, there might be some ground for Mr. Spencer's opinion. But Mr.
Hartland justly says that all the beliefs and institutions of the
Arunta "point in the same direction, namely, that the Arunta are the
most advanced and not the most primitive of the Central Australian
tribes."[4]

The Arunta, a tribe so advanced that it has forgotten its phratry
names, has male kinship, eight matrimonial classes, and _local_ totem
groups, with Headmen hereditary in the male line, and so cannot
possibly be called "primitive," as regards organisation. If, then,
the tribe possesses a peculiar institution, contravening what is
universally practised, the natural inference is that the Arunta
institution, being absolutely isolated and unique, as far as its
non-exogamy goes, in an advanced tribe, is a local freak or "sport,"
like many others which exist. This inference seems to be corroborated
when we discover, as we do at a glance, the peculiar conditions without
which the Arunta organisation is physically impossible. These essential
and indispensable conditions are admitted by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen
to be:--

1. Male reckoning of descent--which is found in very many tribes where
totems are exogamous--as everywhere.

2. Local totem groups, which are a result of male reckoning of descent.
These also are found in many other tribes where, as everywhere, totems
are exogamous.

3. The belief that the spirits of the primal ancestors of the
"Dream-Time" (_Alcheringa_)--creatures evolved out of various animal
shapes into human form--are constantly reincarnated in new-born
children. This belief is found in all the northern tribes with male
descent; and among the Urabunna, who have female descent--but among all
these tribes totems are exogamous, as everywhere.

4. The Arunta and Kaitish, with two or three minor neighbouring tribes,
believe that spirits desiring incarnation, all of one totem in each
case, reside "at certain definite spots." So do the Urabunna believe,
but at each of these spots, in Urabunna land, there may be spirits _of
several different totems._[5] Among the Urabunna, as everywhere, totems
are exogamous. None of these four conditions, nor all of them, can
produce the Arunta totemic non-exogamy.

Finally (5) the Arunta and Kaitish, and they alone, believe not only
that the spirits desiring reincarnation reside at certain definite
spots, and not only that the spirits there are, in each case, _all
of one totem_ (which is essential), but also that these spirits are
most closely associated with objects of stone, inscribed with archaic
markings (_churinga nanja_), which the spirits have dropped in these
places--the scenes where the ancestors died (_Oknanikilla_). These
stone objects, and this belief in their connection with ancestral
spirits, are found in the Arunta region alone, and are the determining
cause, or inseparable accident at least, of the non-exogamy of Arunta
totemism, as will be fully explained later.

Not one of these five conditions is reported by Mr. Howitt among
the primitive south-eastern tribes, and the fifth is found only in
Aruntadom. Yet Mr. Spencer regards as the earliest form of totemism
extant that Arunta form, which requires four conditions, not found in
the tribes of primitive organisation, and a fifth, which is peculiar to
the Arunta "nation" alone.

That the Arunta tribe, whether shut off from all others or not (as
a matter of fact it is not), should alone (while advanced in all
respects, including marriage and ceremonials) have retained a belief
which, though called primitive, is unknown among primitive tribes,
seems a singularly paradoxical hypothesis. Meanwhile the cause of the
Arunta peculiarity--non-exogamous totems--is recognised by Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen, who also declare that the cause is isolated. They
say "it is the idea of spirit individuals associated with _churinga_"
(manufactured objects of stone), "and resident in certain definite
spots, that lies at the root of the present totemic system of the
Arunta tribe."[6]

Again, they inform us that the _churinga_ belief, and the existence of
stone _churinga_, are things isolated. "In the Worgaia tribe, which
inhabits the country to the north-east of the Kaitish" (neighbours of
the Arunta), "we meet, so far as we have been able to discover, with
the last traces of the _churinga_--that is, of the _churinga_ with its
meaning and significance, as known to us in the true central tribes,
as associated with the spirits of _Alcheringa_ ancestors" (mythical
beings, supposed to be constantly reincarnated).[7] Thus, "the present
totemic system of the Arunta tribe,"--in which, contrary to universal
rule, persons of the same totem may inter-marry--reposes on a belief
associated with certain manufactured articles of stone, and neither the
belief nor the stone objects are discovered beyond a certain limited
region. It is proper to add that the regretted Mr. David Carnegie
found, at Family Wells, in the desert of Central Australia, two stone
objects, one plain, the other rudely marked with concentric circles,
which resemble _churinga nanja_. He mentions two others found and
thrown away by Colonel Warburton. The meaning or use of these objects
was not ascertained.[8]

We differ from Messrs. Spencer and Gillen when they think that
this peculiar and isolated belief, held by four or five tribes of
confessedly advanced social organisation and ceremonials (a belief only
possible under advanced social organisation), is the pristine form of
totemism, out of which all totemists, however primitive, have found
their way except the Arunta "nation" alone. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen
write: "... the only conclusion which it seems possible to arrive at
is that in the more northern tribes" (which have no churinga nanja,
no _stone_ churinga), "the churinga represent the surviving relics of
a time when the beliefs among those tribes were similar to those which
now exist among the Arunta. It is more easy to imagine a change which
shall lead from the present Arunta or Kaitish belief to that which
exists among the Warramunga, than it is to imagine one which shall
lead from the Warramunga to the Arunta."[9] Now among the Warramunga,
as everywhere, the division of the totems between the two (exogamous)
moieties is complete, "and, with very few exceptions indeed, the
children follow the father."[10] (These exceptions are not explained.)
Among the Kaitish the same totems occur among both exogamous moieties,
so persons of the same totem _can_ intermarry, but "it is a very rare
thing for a man to marry a woman of the same totem as himself."[11]

The obvious conclusion is the reverse of that which our authors think
"alone possible." The Kaitish have adopted the Arunta _churinga nanja_
usage which introduces the same totem into both exogamous moieties,
but, unlike the Arunta, they have not yet discarded the old universal
rule, "No marriage within the totem." It is not absolutely forbidden,
but it scarcely ever occurs. The Kaitish, as regards exogamy and
religion, are a link between the primitive south-eastern tribes and the
Arunta.

We go on to show in detail how Arunta totems alone ceased to be
exogamous, and to demonstrate that the more northern tribes have never
been, and never can have been, in the present Arunta condition. Among
the Arunta, in the classes, none of them his own, into which alone a
man may marry, there are plenty of women of his own totem. Thus, in
marrying a woman of his totem, but not of his set of classes, a man
does not break the law of Arunta exogamy. Now how does it happen that a
totem may be in both sets of exogamous classes among the Arunta alone
of mankind? Was this always the case from the beginning?

It is, naturally, our opinion that among the Arunta, as everywhere
else, matters were originally, or not much later, so arranged that
the same totem never appeared in both phratries, or, afterwards, when
phratries were lost, in both opposed sets of two or four exogamous
matrimonial classes. The only objection to this theory is that
the Arunta themselves believe it, and mention the circumstance in
their myths. These myths cannot be historical reminiscences of the
"Dream-Time," which never existed. But even a myth may deviate into
truth, especially as the Arunta must know that in other tribes the same
totem never occurs in both phratries, and are clever enough to see that
their method needs explanation as being an exception to general rule;
and that, even now, "the great majority of any one totem belong to one
moiety of the tribe." So they say that originally all Witchetty Grubs,
for instance, were in the Bulthara-Panunga moiety (as most Grubs still
are to this day), while all Emus were in the opposite exogamous moiety
(Purula-Kumura). But, say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "owing to the
system according to which totem names are" (_now_) "acquired, it is