Social Origins and Primal Law. Lang Andrew
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#n46" type="note">46 This sense of peril arises 'in virtue simply of the distinction between a man and his fellows.' Much more, then, are women dangerous to men, and men to women, the sexes being so distinct from each other. We know that the most extraordinary precautions are taken to avoid contact with women in certain circumstances, and a well-known story of Sir John Mandeville's is only one case of the fact that the bridegrooms of some races, from a superstitious terror, insist on being made cocus en herbe. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen give the instance of 'the marriage ceremony' (an odious brutality) among the Arunta of Central Australia.47 It is perhaps intended to deliver the bridegroom from a peril imagined by superstition (as in Mandeville's tale);48 and, without it, the Australian would resemble the man derided in the old Scottish song:
The Bridegroom grat when the sun gaed doon.
Thus a 'religious' dread attaches among savages (the theory holds) to all marriages; all are novelties, new steps in life, and therefore are so far 'sinful' that they involve a peril, vague but awful, the creation of superstition. Marriages contrary to the exogamous rule, are only especially and inexplicably bad cases of the 'sin' – that is, mystic danger – of marital relations in general, as I understand Mr. Crawley. Marriage ceremonies of every kind are devised to avoid 'sin,' as our Marriage Service candidly states, using 'sin' in the Christian sense of the word. But there are savage marriages, those forbidden by the law of exogamy, which, as a general rule, no ceremony can render other than sinful. So great and terrible is the danger of such marriages – namely, among many savages, between persons of the same totem, that it threatens the whole community, just as the marriage of Charles I. with a Catholic bride caused the Plague, according to the Rev. Mr. Row, and therefore such unions are punished by the death penalty, and are but seldom left to the automatic vengeance of the tabu. Foremost in this black list of sins are the unions of brothers and sisters of the full blood, though, we must remember, these are not more heavily punished than marriage between a man and woman of the same totem, even if the pair come together from opposite ends of the continent, and are not blood relations at all. Why is this?
As I understand Mr. Crawley, the sexes, in savagery, avoid each other's society in everyday life, partly from 'sexual tabu' – the result of the superstitions already indicated; partly because of 'sexual solidarity,' perhaps even of 'sexual antipathy.' In fact, men and women are often very much in each other's way. We do not want women in our clubs and smoking-rooms – nor do savages – and we despise a man who lurks in drawing-rooms when his fellows are out of doors; a man who is a pillar of luncheon parties and of afternoon tea. But this separation of the sexes is especially rigid between the children of the same hearth, even among nomads. The boys go with the father, the girls with the mother. The manlike apes have the same ideas. 'Diard was told by the Malays, and he found it afterwards to be true, that the young Siamangs, when in their helpless state, are carried about by their parents, the males by the father, the females by the mother.' 'The nests … are only occupied by the female and young, the male passing the night in a fork of the same tree or another tree in the vicinity.'49
These facts of ape etiquette would, to use an Elizabethan phrase, have been 'nuts' to Mr. Atkinson, and prove that sexual separation of the children is a very early institution. In Australia, New Caledonia, and other countries, brothers and sisters must not even speak to each other, and must avoid each other utterly. Thus the danger and 'sin' of the most innocent intercourse between brothers and sisters is emphasised; much more awful, then, are matrimonial unions of brother and sister. 'The extension' (of this idea) 'by the use of relationships produces the various forms of exogamy,' says Mr. Crawley.50 There are difficulties here; for example, Mr. Crawley tells us that incest did not 'need prevention,' though the rules of brother-and-sister avoidance seem really to mean that it did, or was thought to do so (but perhaps only superstitious dread of ordinary intercourse caused the rule?), and though we know of regions where such incest, in early youth, is said to be universal.51 'Such incest,' says Mr. Crawley, 'is prevented by the psychological difficulty with which love comes into play between persons either closely associated, or strictly separated before the age of puberty…'52 Now we know that lust does come into play – for example, among the Annamese – between brothers and sisters not closely separated; and we also know that, the more persons are 'strictly separated,' the more does the novelty and romance, when they do meet, produce natural attraction, as between Romeo and Juliet. Incest among the young is really prevented by the religious horror with which, by most peoples, it is regarded; as well as, among the civilised, by the constant and sacred familiarity of family life. The bare idea of it can only occur, as a desirable notion, to a boyish revolutionary, like Shelley, or to minds congenitally depraved.
Again, men and women of the same totem have no 'avoidances' forced upon them, as far as I know (and, as they may not marry, this is an oversight); yet their marriages are as terribly sinful as marriages between brother and sister of the full blood. Mr. Crawley writes, 'Obviously the one invariable antecedent in all exogamous systems, indeed in all marriage systems, is the prohibition of marriage "within the house."' But, we reply, A (a male) and B (a female), of the same totem, may never have been in the same house, or in the same degree of latitude and longitude, before they met and fell in love. As to 'house,' houses they may have none. Yet their union is a deadly sin. Mr. Robertson Smith is said to have 'set the question in the right direction,' when he wrote, 'whatever is the origin of bars to marriage, they certainly are early associated with the feeling that it is indecent for house-mates to intermarry.'53
But what is early need not be primary.
Again, if Mr. Crawley reads on, he will find, I think, that the context of Mr. Robertson Smith's argument shows him not to have held that exogamy arose in 'the feeling that it is indecent for "house-mates"' (or tent-mates) 'to marry.' For Mr. Robertson Smith adds, 'it will not do to turn this argument round, and say that the pre-Islamic law of bars to marriage may have arisen … in virtue of a custom that every wife and her children shall have their own tent.[50] In any case, we cannot speak of 'house-mates' before there were houses. But if for 'house-mates' we read 'hearth-mates,' then no sense of 'indecency,' as on Mr. Crawley's theory, need necessarily attend their marriage, for hearth-mates may be of different totems, derived from different mothers, and may be marriageable enough, at least as far as totem law is concerned. A, male, an Emu, marries B, a Bandicoot, and C, a Grub. His children by B have the Bandicoot totem, his children by C have the Grub totem. As far as totem law goes, these children may intermarry, but this is not allowed in practice to-day. Mr. Mathews says, of the Kamilaroi, 'in order to prevent such a close marriage' (of brother and sister on the father's side), 'every tribe has strict social customs, founded upon public opinion, which will not tolerate the union of a man with a woman whose blood relationship is considered too near.'54 Australian ethics, long trained under the old totem and phratry prohibitions, are now sufficiently enlightened to reject unions which we also forbid. But it cannot have been so in the beginning, or the totem and phratry tabus on marriage would have had no occasion to exist. It would have sufficed to say, 'Thou shalt not marry thy sister, or mother,' and the totemic rule would have been a cumbrous superfluity. Superfluous it would have been, even under the hypothetical 'group marriage system,' where the law would have run 'Thou shalt not marry thy group-sister or group-mother.'
While Mr. Matthews gives a kind of bye-law, forbidding marriage, under female descent, with the paternal half-sister, Mr. Fison avers that the Kamilaroi do allow such unions. 'It is marriage within a phratria,' but not within a totem.55 The fact was denied, or at least questioned, by many correspondents, but Mr. Fison believed it to be authentic. 'The natives justified it on the ground that the parties were not of the same mudji' (totem). Apparently these natives, who let a man marry his father's daughter, had not arrived at an objection to unions of 'too near flesh.' But mere decadence, under European whisky, may be the explanation. Mr. Matthews denies, as we saw, what Mr. Fison asserts, as to the Kamilaroi. Mr. Crawley writes, 'if we apply to the word "indecent"
Spencer and Gillen, pp. 92-93.
Lord Avebury's view that the 'rite' implies compensation to the other males of the community will be considered later.
Westermarck, p. 13. Citing Brehm, 'Thierleben,' i. 97,
Westermarck, p. 292.