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."