Lang Andrew
Custom and Myth
The ordinary anthropologist distinguishes a multitude of causes, a variety of processes, which shade into each other and gradually produce the belief in powers invisible, infinite, and divine. What tribe is unacquainted with dreams, visions, magic, the apparitions of the dead? Add to these the slow action of thought, the conjectural inferences, the guesses of crude metaphysics, the theories of isolated men of religious and speculative genius. By all these and other forces manifold, that emotion of awe in presence of the hills, the stars, the sea, is developed. Mr. Max Müller cuts the matter shorter. The early inhabitants of the earth saw a river, and the ‘mere sight’ of the torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to demand ages of the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Müller in his account of the origin of Indian religion.
The mainspring of Mr. Müller’s doctrine is his theory about ‘apprehending the infinite.’ Early religion, or at least that of India, was, in his view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a disinterested emotion of awe.202 Elsewhere, we think, early religion has been a development of ideas of Force, an interested search, not for something wide and far and hard to conceive, but for something practically strong for good and evil. Mr. Müller (taking no count in this place of fetiches, ghosts, dreams and magic) explains that the sense of ‘wonderment’ was wakened by objects only semi-tangible, trees, which are taller than we are, ‘whose roots are beyond our reach, and which have a kind of life in them.’ ‘We are dealing with a quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,’ says Mr. Müller. If a tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a Kaneka, a Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a tree was taller than he, or had ‘a kind of life,’ ‘an unknown and unknowable, yet undeniable something’?203 Why, this is the sentiment of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated period! A troglodyte would look for a ’possum in the tree, he would tap the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs, or he would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Müller not unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical meaning, or if boilyas lived in its boughs, but whose practical way of dealing with the problem of its life was to burn it round the stem, chop the charred wood with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and leaves as they happened to come handy?
Mr. Müller has a long list of semi-tangible objects ‘overwhelming and overawing,’ like the tree. There are mountains, where ‘even a stout heart shivers before the real presence of the infinite’; there are rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is earth. These supply the material for semi-deities. Then come sky, stars, dawn, sun and moon: ‘in these we have the germs of what, hereafter, we shall have to call by the name of deities.’
Before we can transmute, with Mr. Müller, these objects of a somewhat vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noiré’s philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the development of personification and of religion. Noiré’s philological theories are still, I presume, under discussion. They are necessary, however, to Mr. Müller’s doctrine of the development of the vague ‘sense of the infinite’ (wakened by fine old trees, and high mountains) into devas, and of devas (which means ‘shining ones’) into the Vedic gods. Our troglodyte ancestors, and their sweet feeling for the spiritual aspect of landscape, are thus brought into relation with the Rishis of the Vedas, the sages and poets of a pleasing civilisation. The reverence felt for such comparatively refined or remote things as fire, the sun, wind, thunder, the dawn, furnished a series of stepping-stones to the Vedic theology, if theology it can be called. It is impossible to give each step in detail; the process must be studied in Mr. Müller’s lectures. Nor can we discuss the later changes of faith. As to the processes which produced the fetichistic ‘corruption’ (that universal and everywhere identical form of decay), Mr. Müller does not afford even a hint. He only says that, when the Indians found that their old gods were mere names, ‘they built out of the scattered bricks a new altar to the Unknown God’ – a statement which throws no light on the parasitical development of fetichism. But his whole theory is deficient if, having called fetichism a corruption, he does not show how corruption arose, how it operated, and how the disease attacked all religions everywhere.
We have contested, step by step, many of Mr. Müller’s propositions. If space permitted, it would be interesting to examine the actual attitude of certain contemporary savages, Bushmen and others, towards the sun. Contemporary savages may be degraded, they certainly are not primitive, but their legends, at least, are the oldest things they possess. The supernatural elements in their ideas about the sun are curiously unlike those which, according to Mr. Müller, entered into the development of Aryan religion.
The last remark which has to be made about Mr. Müller’s scheme of the development of Aryan religion is that the religion, as explained by him, does not apparently aid the growth of society, nor work with it in any way. Let us look at a sub-barbaric society – say that of Zululand, of New Zealand, of the Iroquois League, or at a savage society like that of the Kanekas, or of those Australian tribes about whom we have very many interesting and copious accounts. If we begin with the Australians, we observe that society is based on certain laws of marriage enforced by capital punishment. These laws of marriage forbid the intermixing of persons belonging to the stock which worships this or that animal, or plant. Now this rule, as already observed, made the ‘gentile’ system (as Mr. Morgan erroneously calls it) the system which gradually reduces tribal hostility, by making tribes homogeneous. The same system (with the religious sanction of a kind of zoolatry) is in force and has worked to the same result, in Africa, Asia, America, and Australia, while a host of minute facts make it a reasonable conclusion that it prevailed in Europe. Among these facts certain peculiarities of Greek and Roman and Hindoo marriage law, Greek, Latin, and English tribal names, and a crowd of legends are the most prominent.204 Mr. Max Müller’s doctrine of the development of Indian religion (while admitting the existence of Snake or Naga tribes) takes no account of the action of this universal zoolatry on religion and society.
After marriage and after tribal institutions, look at rank. Is it not obvious that the religious elements (magic and necromancy) left out of his reckoning by Mr. Müller are most powerful in developing rank? Even among those democratic paupers, the Fuegians, ‘the doctor-wizard of each party has much influence over his companions.’ Among those other democrats, the Eskimo, a class of wizards, called Angakuts, become ‘a kind of civil magistrates,’ because they can cause fine weather, and can magically detect people who commit offences. Thus the germs of rank, in these cases, are sown by the magic which is fetichism in action. Try the Zulus: ‘the heaven is the chief’s,’ he can call up clouds and storms, hence the sanction of his authority. In New Zealand, every Rangatira has a supernatural power. If he touches an article, no one else dares to appropriate it, for fear of terrible supernatural consequences. A head chief is ‘tapued an inch thick, and perfectly unapproachable.’ Magical power abides in and emanates from him. By this superstition, an aristocracy is formed, and property (the property, at least, of the aristocracy) is secured. Among the Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, ‘priests and jugglers are the persons that make war and have a voice in the sale of the land.’ Mr. E. W. Robertson says much the same thing about early Scotland. If Odin was not a god with the gifts of a medicine-man, and did not owe his chiefship to his talent for dealing with magic, he is greatly maligned. The Irish Brehons also sanctioned legal decisions by magical devices, afterwards condemned by the Church. Among the Zulus, ‘the Itongo (spirit) dwells with the great man; he who dreams is the chief of the village.’ The chief alone can ‘read in the vessel of divination.’ The Kaneka chiefs are medicine-men.
Here then, in widely distant regions, in early European, American, Melanesian, African societies, we find those factors in religion which the primitive Aryans are said to have dispensed with, helping to construct society, rank, property. Is it necessary to add that the ancestral spirits still ‘rule the present from the past,’ and demand sacrifice, and speak to ‘him who dreams,’ who, therefore, is a strong force in society, if not a chief? Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Tylor, M. Fustel de Coulanges, a dozen others, have made all this matter of common notoriety. As Hearne the traveller says about the Copper River Indians, ‘it is almost necessary that they who rule them should profess something a little supernatural to enable them to deal with the people.’ The few examples we have given show how widely, and among what untutored races, the need is felt. The rudimentary government of early peoples requires, and, by aid of dreams, necromancy, ‘medicine’ (i. e., fetiches), tapu, and so forth, obtains, a supernatural sanction.
Where is the supernatural sanction that consecrated the chiefs of a race which woke to the sense of the existence of infinite beings, in face of trees, rivers, the dawn, the sun, and had none of the so-called late and corrupt fetichism that does such useful social work?
To the student of other early societies, Mr. Müller’s theory of the growth of Aryan religion seems to leave society without cement, and without the most necessary sanctions. One man is as good as another, before a tree, a river, a hill. The savage organisers of other societies found out fetiches and ghosts that were ‘respecters of persons.’ Zoolatry is intertwisted with the earliest and most widespread law of prohibited degrees. How did the Hindoos dispense with the aid of these superstitions? Well, they did not quite dispense with them. Mr. Max Müller remarks, almost on his last page (376), that ‘in India also … the thoughts and feelings about those whom death had separated from us for a time, supplied some of the earliest and most important elements of religion.’ If this was the case, surely the presence of those elements and their influence should have been indicated along with the remarks about the awfulness of trees and the suggestiveness of rivers. Is nothing said about the spirits of the dead and their cult in the Vedas? Much is said, of course. But, were it otherwise, then other elements of savage religion may also have been neglected there, and it will be impossible to argue that fetichism did not exist because it is not mentioned. It will also be impossible to admit that the Hibbert Lectures give more than a one-sided account of the Origin of Indian Religion.
The perusal of Mr. Max Müller’s book deeply impresses one with the necessity of studying early religions and early societies simultaneously. If it be true that early Indian religion lacked precisely those superstitions, so childish, so grotesque, and yet so useful, which we find at work in contemporary tribes, and which we read of in history, the discovery is even more remarkable and important than the author of the Hibbert Lectures seems to suppose. It is scarcely necessary to repeat that the negative evidence of the Vedas, the religious utterances of sages, made in a time of what we might call ‘heroic culture,’ can never disprove the existence of superstitions which, if current in the former experience of the race, the hymnists, as Barth observes, would intentionally ignore. Our object has been to defend the ‘primitiveness of fetichism.’ By this we do not mean to express any opinion as to whether fetichism (in the strictest sense of the word) was or was not earlier than totemism, than the worship of the dead, or than the involuntary sense of awe and terror with which certain vast phenomena may have affected the earliest men. We only claim for the powerful and ubiquitous practices of fetichism a place among the early elements of religion, and insist that what is so universal has not yet been shown to be ‘a corruption’ of something older and purer.
One remark of Mr. Max Müller’s fortifies these opinions. If fetichism be indeed one of the earliest factors of faith in the supernatural; if it be, in its rudest forms, most powerful in proportion to other elements of faith among the least cultivated races (and that Mr. Müller will probably allow) – among what class of cultivated peoples will it longest hold its ground? Clearly, among the least cultivated, among the fishermen, the shepherds of lonely districts, the peasants of outlying lands – in short, among the people. Neglected by sacred poets in the culminating period of purity in religion, it will linger among the superstitions of the rustics. There is no real break in the continuity of peasant life; the modern folklore is (in many points) the savage ritual. Now Mr. Müller, when he was minimising the existence of fetichism in the Rig Veda (the oldest collection of hymns), admitted its existence in the Âtharvana (p. 60).205 On p. 151, we read ‘the Atharva-veda-Sanhita is a later collection, containing, besides a large number of Rig Veda verses, some curious relics of popular poetry connected with charms, imprecations, and other superstitious usages.’ The italics are mine, and are meant to emphasise this fact: – When we leave the sages, the Rishis, and look at what is popular, look at what that class believed which of savage practice has everywhere retained so much, we are at once among the charms and the fetiches! This is precisely what one would have expected. If the history of religion and of mythology is to be unravelled, we must examine what the unprogressive classes in Europe have in common with Australians and Bushmen, and Andaman Islanders. It is the function of the people to retain in folklore these elements of religion, which it is the high duty of the sage and the poet to purify away in the fire of refining thought. It is for this very reason that ritual has (though Mr. Max Müller curiously says that it seems not to possess) an immense scientific interest. Ritual holds on, with the tenacity of superstition, to all that has ever been practised. Yet, when Mr. Müller wants to know about origins, about actual ancient practice, he deliberately turns to that ‘great collection of ancient poetry’ (the Rig Veda) ‘which has no special reference to sacrificial acts,’ not to the Brahmanas which are full of ritual.
To sum up briefly: – (1) Mr. Müller’s arguments against the evidence for, and the primitiveness of, fetichism seem to demonstrate the opposite of that which he intends them to prove. (2) His own evidence for primitive practice is chosen from the documents of a cultivated society. (3) His theory deprives that society of the very influences which have elsewhere helped the Tribe, the Family, Rank, and Priesthoods to grow up, and to form the backbone of social existence.
THE FAMILY
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY
What are the original forms of the human family? Did man begin by being monogamous or polygamous, but, in either case, the master of his own home and the assured central point of his family relations? Or were the unions of the sexes originally shifting and precarious, so that the wisest child was not expected to know his own father, and family ties were reckoned through the mother alone? Again (setting aside the question of what was ‘primitive’ and ‘original’), did the needs and barbarous habits of early men lead to a scarcity of women, and hence to polyandry (that is, the marriage of one woman to several men), with the consequent uncertainty about male parentage? Once more, admitting that these loose and strange relations of the sexes do prevail, or have prevailed, among savages, is there any reason to suppose that the stronger races, the Aryan and Semitic stocks, ever passed through this stage of savage customs? These are the main questions debated between what we may call the ‘historical’ and the ‘anthropological’ students of ancient customs.
When Sir Henry Maine observed, in 1861, that it was difficult to say what society of men had not been, originally, based on the patriarchal family, he went, of course, outside the domain of history. What occurred in the very origin of human society is a question perhaps quite inscrutable. Certainly, history cannot furnish the answer. Here the anthropologist and physiologist come in with their methods, and even those, we think, can throw but an uncertain light on the very ‘origin’ of institutions, and on strictly primitive man.
For the purposes of this discussion, we shall here re-state the chief points at issue between the adherents of Sir Henry Maine and of Mr. M‘Lennan, between historical and anthropological inquirers.
1. Did man originally live in the patriarchal family, or did he live in more or less modified promiscuity, with uncertainty of blood-ties, and especially of male parentage?
2. Did circumstances and customs at some time compel or induce man (whatever his original condition) to resort to practices which made paternity uncertain, and so caused kinship to be reckoned through women?
3. Granting that some races have been thus reduced to matriarchal forms of the family – that is, to forms in which the woman is the permanent recognised centre – is there any reason to suppose that the stronger peoples, like the Aryans and the Semites, ever passed through a stage of culture in which female, not male, kinship was chiefly recognised, probably as a result of polyandry, of many husbands to one wife?
On this third question, it will be necessary to produce much evidence of very different sorts: evidence which, at best, can perhaps only warrant an inference, or presumption, in favour of one or the other opinion. For the moment, the impartial examination of testimony is more important and practicable than the establishment of any theory.
(1) Did man originally live in the patriarchal family, the male being master of his female mate or mates, and of his children? On this first point Sir Henry Maine, in his new volume,206 may be said to come as near proving his case as the nature and matter of the question will permit. Bachofen, M‘Lennan, and Morgan, all started from a hypothetical state of more or less modified sexual promiscuity. Bachofen’s evidence (which may be referred to later) was based on a great mass of legends, myths, and travellers’ tales, chiefly about early Aryan practices. He discovered Hetärismus, as he called it, or promiscuity, among Lydians, Etruscans, Persians, Thracians, Cyrenian nomads, Egyptians, Scythians, Troglodytes, Nasamones, and so forth. Mr. M‘Lennan’s view is, perhaps, less absolutely stated than Sir Henry Maine supposes. M‘Lennan says207 ‘that there has been a stage in the development of the human races, when there was no such appropriation of women to particular men; when, in short, marriage, as it exists among civilised nations, was not practised. Marriage, in this sense, was yet undreamt of.’ Mr. M‘Lennan adds (pp. 130, 131), ‘as among other gregarious animals, the unions of the sexes were probably, in the earliest times, loose, transitory, and, in some degree, promiscuous.’
Sir Henry Maine opposes to Mr. M‘Lennan’s theory the statement of Mr. Darwin: ‘From all we know of the passions of all male quadrupeds, promiscuous intercourse in a state of Nature is highly improbable.’208 On this first question, let us grant to Sir Henry Maine, to Mr. Darwin, and to common-sense that if the very earliest men were extremely animal in character, their unions while they lasted were probably monogamous or polygamous. The sexual jealousy of the male would secure that result, as it does among many other animals. Let the first point, then, be scored to Sir Henry Maine: let it be granted that if man was created perfect, he lived in the monogamous family before the Fall: and that, if he was evolved as an animal, the unchecked animal instincts would make for monogamy or patriarchal polygamy in the strictly primitive family.
(2) Did circumstances and customs ever or anywhere compel or induce man (whatever his original condition) to resort to practices which made paternity uncertain, and so caused the absence of the patriarchal family, kinship being reckoned through women? If this question be answered in the affirmative, and if the sphere of action of the various causes be made wide enough, it will not matter much to Mr. M‘Lennan’s theory whether the strictly primitive family was patriarchal or not. If there occurred a fall from the primitive family, and if that fall was extremely general, affecting even the Aryan race, Mr. M‘Lennan’s adherents will be amply satisfied. Their object is to show that the family, even in the Aryan race, was developed through a stage of loose savage connections. If that can be shown, they do not care much about primitive man properly so called. Sir Henry Maine admits, as a matter of fact, that among certain races, in certain districts, circumstances have overridden the sexual jealousy which secures the recognition of male parentage. Where women have been few, and where poverty has been great, jealousy has been suppressed, even in the Venice of the eighteenth century. Sir H. Maine says: ‘The usage’ (that of polyandry – many husbands to a single wife) ‘seems to me one which circumstances overpowering morality and decency might at any time call into existence. It is known to have arisen in the native Indian army.’ The question now is, what are the circumstances that overpower morality and decency, and so produce polyandry, with its necessary consequences, when it is a recognised institution – the absence of the patriarchal family, and the recognition of kinship through women? Any circumstances which cause great scarcity of women will conduce to those results. Mr. M‘Lennan’s opinion was, that the chief cause of scarcity of women has been the custom of female infanticide – of killing little girls as bouches inutiles. Sir Henry Maine admits that ‘the cause assigned by M‘Lennan is a vera causa– it is capable of producing the effects.’209 Mr. M‘Lennan collected a very large mass of testimony to prove the wide existence of this cause of paucity of women. Till that evidence is published, I can only say that it was sufficient, in Mr. M‘Lennan’s opinion, to demonstrate the wide prevalence of the factor which is the mainspring of his whole system.210 How frightfully female infanticide has prevailed in India, every one may read in the official reports of Col. M‘Pherson, and other English authorities. Mr. Fison’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai contains some notable, though not to my mind convincing, arguments on the other side. Sir Henry Maine adduces another cause of paucity of women: the wanderings of our race, and expeditions across sea.211 This cause would not, however, be important enough to alter forms of kinship, where the invaders (like the early English in Britain) found a population which they could conquer and whose women they could appropriate.
Apart from any probable inferences that may be drawn from the presumed practice of female infanticide, actual ascertained facts prove that many races do not now live, or that recently they did not live, in the patriarchal or modern family. They live, or did live, in polyandrous associations. The Thibetans, the Nairs, the early inhabitants of Britain (according to Cæsar), and many other races,212 as well as the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands, and the Iroquois (according to Lafitau), practise, or have practised, polyandry.
We now approach the third and really important problem – (3) Is there any reason to suppose that the stronger peoples, like the Aryans and the Semites, ever passed through a stage of culture in which female, not male, kinship was chiefly recognised, probably as a result of polyandry?
Now the nature of the evidence which affords a presumption that Aryans have all passed through Australian institutions, such as polyandry, is of extremely varied character. Much of it may undoubtedly be explained away. But such strength as the evidence has (which we do not wish to exaggerate) is derived from its convergence to one point – namely, the anterior existence of polyandry and the matriarchal family among Aryans before and after the dawn of real history.
For the sake of distinctness we may here number the heads of the evidence bearing on this question. We have —
1. The evidence of inference from the form of capture in bridal ceremonies.
2. The evidence from exogamy: the law which forbids marriage between persons of the same family name.
3. The evidence from totemism – that is, the derivation of the family name and crest or badge, from some natural object, plant or animal.213 Persons bearing the name may not intermarry, nor, as a rule, may they eat the object from which they derive their family name and from which they claim to be descended.
4. The evidence from the gens of Rome, or γένος of ancient Greece, in connection with Totemism.
5. The evidence from myth and legend.
6. The evidence from direct historical statements as to the prevalence of the matriarchal family, and inheritance through the maternal line.
To take these various testimonies in their order, let us begin with —
(1) The form of capture in bridal ceremonies. That this form survived in Sparta, Crete, in Hindoo law, in the traditions of Ireland, in the popular rustic customs of Wales, is not denied.
If we hold, with Mr. M‘Lennan, that scarcity of women (produced by female infanticide or otherwise) is the cause of the habit of capturing wives, we may see, in survivals of this ceremony of capture among Aryans, a proof of early scarcity of women, and of probable polyandry. But an opponent may argue, like Mr. J. A. Farrer in Primitive Manners, that the ceremony of capture is mainly a concession to maiden modesty among early races. Here one may observe that the girls of savage tribes are notoriously profligate and immodest about illicit connections. Only honourable marriage brings a blush to the cheek of these young persons. This is odd, but, in the present state of the question, we cannot lean on the evidence of the ceremony of capture. We cannot demonstrate that it is derived from a time when paucity of women made capture of brides necessary. Thus ‘honours are easy’ in this first deal.
(2) The next indication is very curious, and requires much more prolonged discussion. The custom of Exogamy was first noted and named by Mr. M‘Lennan. Exogamy is the prohibition of marriage within the supposed blood-kinship, as denoted by the family name. Such marriage, among many backward races, is reckoned incestuous, and is punishable by death. Certain peculiarities in connection with the family name have to be noted later. Now, Sir Henry Maine admits that exogamy, as thus defined, exists among the Hindoos. ‘A Hindoo may not marry a woman belonging to the same gotra, all members of the gotra being theoretically supposed to have descended from the same ancestor.’ The same rule prevails in China. ‘There are in China large bodies of related clansmen, each generally bearing the same clan-name. They are exogamous; no man will marry a woman having the same clan-name with himself.’ It is admitted by Sir Henry Maine that this wide prohibition of marriage was the early Aryan rule, while advancing civilisation has gradually permitted marriage within limits once forbidden. The Greek Church now (according to Mr. M‘Lennan), and the Catholic Church in the past, forbade intermarriages ‘as far as relationship could be known.’ The Hindoo rule appears to go still further, and to prohibit marriage as far as the common gotra name seems merely to indicate relationship.
As to the ancient Romans, Plutarch says: ‘Formerly they did not marry women connected with them by blood, any more than they now marry aunts or sisters. It was long before they would even intermarry with cousins.’214 Plutarch also remarks that, in times past, Romans did not marry συγγενίδας, and if we may render this ‘women of the same gens,’ the exogamous prohibition in Rome was as complete as among the Hindoos. I do not quite gather from Sir Henry Maine’s account of the Slavonic house communities (pp. 254, 255) whether they dislike all kindred marriages, or only marriage within the ‘greater blood’ – that is, within the kinship on the male side. He says: ‘The South Slavonians bring their wives into the group, in which they are socially organised, from a considerable distance outside… Every marriage which requires an ecclesiastical dispensation is regarded as disreputable.’
On the whole, wide prohibitions of marriage are archaic: the widest are savage; the narrowest are modern and civilised. Thus the Hindoo prohibition is old, barbarous and wide. ‘The barbarous Aryan,’ says Sir Henry Maine, ‘is generally exogamous. He has a most extensive table of prohibited degrees.’ Thus exogamy seems to be a survival of barbarism. The question for us is, Can we call exogamy a survival from a period when (owing to scarcity of women and polyandry) clear ideas of kinship were impossible? If this can be proved, exogamous Aryans either passed through polyandrous institutions, or borrowed a savage custom derived from a period when ideas of kinship were obscure.
If we only knew the origin of the prohibition to marry within the family name all would be plain sailing. At present several theories of the origin of exogamy are before the world. Mr. Morgan, the author of Ancient Society, inclines to trace the prohibition to a great early physiological discovery, acted on by primitive men by virtue of a contrat social. Early man discovered that children of unsound constitutions were born of nearly-related parents. Mr. Morgan says: ‘Primitive men very early discovered the evils of close interbreeding.’ Elsewhere Mr. Morgan writes: ‘Intermarriage in the gens was prohibited, to secure the benefits of marrying out with unrelated persons.’ This arrangement ‘was a product of high intelligence,’ and Mr. Morgan calls it a ‘reform.’215
