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.