Next we have to ask how, granting the hypothesis of the promiscuous horde, man ceased to be promiscuous. It will be seen that, on a theory of Mr. Howitt's, man was, in fact, far on the way of ceasing to be promiscuous or a "horde's man," before he introduced the moral reform of bisecting his horde into phratries, for the purpose of preventing brother with sister marriages. Till unions were permanent, and kin recognised, things impossible in a state of promiscuity, nobody could dream of forbidding brother and sister marriage, because nobody could know who was brother or sister to whom. Now, Mr. Howitt does indicate a way in which man might cease to be promiscuous, before any sage invented the system of exogamous phratries.
He writes,[1] "I start ... from the assumption that there was once an undivided commune ... I do not desire to be understood as maintaining that it implies necessarily the assumption of complete communism between the sexes. Assuming that the former physical conditions of the Australian continent were much as they are now, complete communism always existing would, I think, be an impossibility. The character of the country, the necessity of hunting for food, and of removing from one spot to another in search of game and of vegetable food, would necessarily cause any undivided commune, when it assumed dimensions of more than that of a few members, to break up, under the necessities of existence, into two or more communes of similar constitution to itself. In addition to this it has become evident to me, after a long acquaintance with the Australian savage, that, in the past as now, individual likes and dislikes must have existed; so that, although there was the admitted common right between certain groups of the commune, in practice these rights would either not be exercised by reason of various causes, or would remain in abeyance, so far as the separated but allied undivided communes were concerned, until on great ceremonial occasions, or where certain periodical gatherings for food purposes reunited temporarily all the segments of the original community. In short, so far as the evidence goes at present, I am inclined to regard the probable condition of the undivided commune as being well represented now by what occurs when on certain occasions the modified divided communes reunite."[2]
What occurs in these festive assemblies among certain central and northern tribes, as we have seen, is a legalised and restricted change of wives all round, with disregard, in some cases, of some of the tribal rules against incest. On Mr. Howitt's theory the undivided communal horde must always have been, as I have urged, dividing itself, owing to lack of supplies. It would be a very small group, continually broken up, and intercourse of the sexes even in that group, must have been restrained by jealousy, based on the asserted existence of individual "likes" and "dislikes." These restrictions, again, must have led to some idea that the man usually associated with, and responsible for feeding, and protecting, and correcting the woman and her children, was just the man who "liked" her, the man whom she "liked," and the man who "disliked" other men if they wooed her.
But that state of things is not an undivided communal horde at all! It is much more akin to the state of things in which I take marriage rules to have arisen.
We may suppose, then, that early moral distinctions and restrictions grew up among the practically "family" groups of everyday life, as described by Mr. Howitt, and we need not discuss again the question whether, at this very early period, there existed a community exactly like the local tribe of to-day in every respect—except that marriage was utterly unregulated, till an inspired medicine man promulgated the law of exogamy, his own invention.
Mr. Howitt began his long and invaluable studies of these problems as a disciple of Mr. Lewis Morgan. That scholar was a warm partisan of the primeval horde, of group marriage, and (at times) of a reformatory movement. These ideas, first admitted to Mr. Howitt's mind, have remained with him, but he has seen clearly that the whole theory needed at least that essential modification which his practical knowledge of savage life has enabled him to make. He does not seem to me to hold that the promiscuous horde suddenly, for no reason, reformed itself: his reformers had previous ethical training in a state of daily life which is not that of the hypothetical horde. But he still clings to the horde, tiny as it must have been, as the source of a tradition of a brief-lived period of promiscuity. This faith is but the "after-image" left in his mental processes by the glow of Mr. Morgan's theory, but the faith is confirmed by his view of the terms of relationship, and of the Piraungaru, Pirrauru, and similar customs. We have shown, in the last chapter, that the terms and the customs are not necessarily proofs of promiscuity in the past, but may be otherwise interpreted with logical consistency, and in conformity with human nature.
The statement of Mr. Howitt shows how the communal horde of the hypothesis might come to see that it needed moral reformation. In daily life, by Mr. Howitt's theory, it had practically ceased to be a communal horde before the medicine man was inspired to reform it. The hypothesis of Professor Baldwin Spencer resembles that of Mr. Howitt, but, unlike his (as it used to stand), accounts for the existence of animal-named sets of people within the phratries. Mr. Spencer, starting from the present social condition of the Arunta "nation" or group of tribes (Arunta, Kaitish, Ilpirra, Unmatjera), supposes that these tribes retain pristine traits, once universal, but now confined to them. The peculiar pristine traits, by the theory, are (1) the existence of animal-named local societies for magical purposes. The members of each local group worked magic for their name-giving animal or plant, but any one might marry a woman of his own group name, Eagle Hawk, Cockatoo, and the like, while these names were not inherited, either from father or mother, and did not denote a bond of kinship. Mr. Spencer, then, supposes the horde to have been composed of such magical societies, at a very remote date, before sexual relations were regulated by any law. Later, in some fashion, and for some reason which Mr. Spencer does not profess to explain, "there was felt the need of some form of organisation, and this gradually resulted in the development of exogamous groups."[3] These "exogamous groups," among the Arunta, are now the four or eight "matrimonial classes," as among other tribes of northern Australia. These tribes, as a rule, have phratries, but the Arunta have lost even the phratry names.
Mr. Spencer's theory thus explains the existence of animal-named groups—as co-operative magical societies, for breeding the animals or plants—but does not explain how exogamy arose, or why, everywhere, except among the Arunta, all the animal or plant named sets of people are kinships, and are exogamous, while they are neither the one or the other among the Arunta. Either the Arunta groups have once been exogamous totem kinships, and have ceased to be so, becoming magical societies; or such animal-named sets of people have, everywhere, first been magical societies, and later become exogamous totem kinships. Mr. Spencer holds the latter view, we hold the former, believing that the Arunta have once been in the universal state of totemic exogamy, and that, by a perfectly intelligible process, their animal-named groups have become magical societies, no longer exogamous kinships. We can show how the old exogamous totem kinship, among the Arunta, became a magical society, not regulating sexual relations; but we cannot imagine how all totemic mankind, if they began with magical societies in an unregulated horde, should have everywhere, except among the Arunta, conspired to convert these magical societies into kinships with exogamy. If the social organisation of the Arunta were peculiarly primitive, if their beliefs and ceremonials were of the most archaic type, there might be some ground for Mr. Spencer's opinion. But Mr. Hartland justly says that all the beliefs and institutions of the Arunta "point in the same direction, namely, that the Arunta are the most advanced and not the most primitive of the Central Australian tribes."[4]
The Arunta, a tribe so advanced that it has forgotten its phratry names, has male kinship, eight matrimonial classes, and local totem groups, with Headmen hereditary in the male line, and so cannot possibly be called "primitive," as regards organisation. If, then, the tribe possesses a peculiar institution, contravening what is universally practised, the natural inference is that the Arunta institution, being absolutely isolated and unique, as far as its non-exogamy goes, in an advanced tribe, is a local freak or "sport," like many others which exist. This inference seems to be corroborated when we discover, as we do at a glance, the peculiar conditions without which the Arunta organisation is physically impossible. These essential and indispensable conditions are admitted by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen to be:—