Kamilaroi, 'in order to prevent such a close marriage' (of brother and sister on the father's side), 'every tribe has strict social customs, founded upon public opinion, which will not tolerate the union of a man with a woman whose blood relationship is considered too near.'54 Australian ethics, long trained under the old totem and phratry prohibitions, are now sufficiently enlightened to reject unions which we also forbid. But it cannot have been so in the beginning, or the totem and phratry tabus on marriage would have had no occasion to exist. It would have sufficed to say, 'Thou shalt not marry thy sister, or mother,' and the totemic rule would have been a cumbrous superfluity. Superfluous it would have been, even under the hypothetical 'group marriage system,' where the law would have run 'Thou shalt not marry thy group-sister or group-mother.'
While Mr. Matthews gives a kind of bye-law, forbidding marriage, under female descent, with the paternal half-sister, Mr. Fison avers that the Kamilaroi do allow such unions. 'It is marriage within a phratria,' but not within a totem.55 The fact was denied, or at least questioned, by many correspondents, but Mr. Fison believed it to be authentic. 'The natives justified it on the ground that the parties were not of the same mudji' (totem). Apparently these natives, who let a man marry his father's daughter, had not arrived at an objection to unions of 'too near flesh.' But mere decadence, under European whisky, may be the explanation. Mr. Matthews denies, as we saw, what Mr. Fison asserts, as to the Kamilaroi. Mr. Crawley writes, 'if we apply to the word "indecent" the connotation of sexual tabu … and if we understand by "house-mates" those upon whom sexual tabu concentrates, we have explained exogamy.'56
Scarcely, for sexual tabu against marriage, in fact, now, at least, concentrates on people of near kin, and on totem-mates, man and woman of the same totem, and they may be 'house-mates,' or 'hearth-mates,' or they may not (in polygamous society), and the hearth-mates (as far as the totem rule goes, but not now in practice) may thus be intermarriageable, as not of the same totem, while totem-mates, from opposite ends of a continent, are not intermarriageable (except in the peculiar case of the Arunta and cognate tribes).
But Mr. Crawley may reply that each totem, originally, did really pertain to all members of each small local group, and that the totem prohibition was extended, later, to all groups of the same totem name, however distant in space. Thus according to the Euahlayi blacks there were originally no totem names, but the divine Baiame gave them to mortals with the rule that no pair of the same totem name were to marry, 'however far apart their hunting grounds.' Thus considered, the tabu which forbids an Emu man to marry an Emu woman, would mean no more, originally, than that marriage between persons living in the close contiguity of the same local group (in this case the Emu group) was forbidden. There might be no original intention of prohibiting marriage with a person of an Emu group, dwelling a thousand miles away; probably no such group was known to exist. The original meaning of exogamous law, I repeat, would be merely 'you must not marry a hearth-mate,' – or a 'house-mate,' in Mr. Crawley's phrase – the hearth-mates, in this particular instance, being delimited by the name 'Emu.' So far my conjecture agrees with that of Mr. Crawley. The extension of the prohibition to persons of the same totem-name, however remote their homes and alien their blood, I am content to regard as a later kind of accidental corollary. There came to be totem kins of the same name, far remote, and thus, as it were casually, the law acquired an unpremeditated sweep and scope, including persons not really of the same group or blood, only of the same name.
But why was there originally any objection at all to marrying the most accessible bride, the female hearth-mate? Here, as I have tried to show, Mr. Crawley would explain by his idea of sexual tabu. All men are regarded with superstitious dread by all women, and vice versa; above all, as a daily danger, the men, or women living in close contiguity must avoid each other. To keep them apart all sorts of tabus and avoidances are invented, including the tabu on their marriage.
This is a plausible and taking theory, and I am far from arguing that it cannot be a true theory. But the insuperable difficulty of deciding arises from the circumstance that we know nothing at all about the intellectual condition of the more or less human beings among whom the prohibition of marriage within the group first arose. Were they advanced enough to be capable of such a superstitious dread of each other as the supposed cause of the prohibition takes for granted? Males and females, among the lower animals, have no such superstition. It requires human imagination. On the other hand, animal jealousy was well within their reach, and Mr. Atkinson derives the original prohibition of marriage within the group from the sheer sexual jealousy of the animal-patriarch. In his opinion the consequent aversion to such wedlock crystallised into a habit, as the race advanced towards full humanity.
Even before his anthropoid clients were completely human, the group would be replete with children of females not of the full group blood, captives, and therefore these children (if blood kin through females were regarded) would be eligible as wives. But this would not yet, of course, be understood. Perhaps it would not be fully understood till the totem name was given to, and accepted by, each group, and so there was a definite mark set on each woman brought in from without the group, and on her children, who bore her totem name. After that, each totem group obviously contained members of other totems, and those, being now recognised by their mother's totem names, were technically intermarriageable. What had been a group not explicitly conscious of its own heterogeneous elements, became, in fact, an assemblage of recognised heterogeneousness, capable of finding legal brides within itself, and no longer under the necessity (had it understood) of capturing brides from without in hostile fashion. Such an assemblage would, or might, come to consist of families, dwelling, or rather wandering, within a given region, all on terms of friendship and mutual aid. I take it that, by this time, improved weapons and instruments, and improved skill, enabled groups larger than the small original groups to live in a given area. In fact, the group would, or might, be a small local 'tribe,' but, probably, was unconscious of the circumstance. If conscious, one cause of hostility among the groups was at an end, there was no necessity for stealing women, a system of peaceful betrothals within the group might now arise, though certain facts, to be dealt with later, raise a presumption, perhaps, that this relatively peaceful state of life did not appear until two of the original local totem groups coalesced in connubium, intermarrying with each other, in fact becoming 'phratries.'
To produce the new condition of affairs, two factors were necessary: first, a means of distinguishing the captured women within every group from each other, and from the group into which they were brought by capture. This means of distinction was afforded by the totem names. Next, a recognition of kinship was needed, and this was supplied, let us conjecture, by naming the children of each of the captive women after the totem name of the group from which she was captured. If all the children indiscriminately were called by the totem name (say Emu) of the local group into which their mothers had been brought – that is, by the totem name of their fathers – there would be no recognisable heterogeneity within that group, and so there would be, within the local group, no possible wives, under the exogamous rule. Whether polyandry then existed, or not, still all the fathers were of one local totem name, say Emu, and children could only be differentiated by styling them after the totem names of their alien mothers. This is usually done among the savages who are least advanced, but not among the Arunta, whose totem names, as we shall see, by a curious divergence, do not indicate stock, but are derived from a singular superstition about ancestral spirits, of various totems, incarnating themselves in each new-born child.
Mr. McLennan, in Primitive Marriage (1865), had arrived at conclusions very like these. The primitive groups 'were assumed to be homogeneous… While as yet there was no system of kinship, the presence of captive women in a horde' (group), 'in whatever numbers, could not introduce a system of betrothals' – the women and their children not yet being differentiated from each other, and from the group in which they lived. Mr. McLennan, in 1865, did not ask how these women ever came to be distinctly differentiated, each from each, and from the group which held them, though that differentiation was a necessary prelude to the recognition of kindred through these women. But presently, in his Studies of Totemism (1869), he found, whether he
