If two strong local groups, say Emu and Kangaroo, or Eagle Hawk and Crow, took the lead in this treaty of alliance and connubium, and if the other local groups gradually came into it under their leadership (for union would make Eagle Hawk and Crow powerful), or if several local groups chose two such groups to head them in a peaceful exchange of brides, we have, in these two now united and intermarrying local groups of animal name, say Eagle Hawk and Crow, the primal forms of the actual phratries of to-day.
But why do we find in a tribe only two phratries? I have asked myself and been asked by others. In the first place, in America, we note examples of three or more phratries in the same tribe. Again, in Australia, we seem to myself to find probable traces of more than two phratries in a tribe, traces of what Mr. Frazer styles "sub-phratries," what one may call "submerged phratries" (see Chapter X.). Further, dual alliances are the most usual form of such combinations: two strong groups, allied and setting the example, would attract the neighbouring groups into their circle. Finally, if I am right in thinking that the phratriac arrangement arose in a given centre, and was propagated by emigrants, and was borrowed by distant tribes (which is a point elsewhere discussed), the original model of a dual alliance would spread almost universally, while, as has been said, traces of more numerous combinations appear to occur.
Except as parties of old to a peaceful arrangement, the phratries, as they at present exist (where they exist), have often now no reason for existence. Where totems are exogamous, or where totems and matrimonial classes exist, the phratry is now an empty survival; having done its work it does no more work, and often vanishes. If members of local animal-named groups, become fully totemic, had at once understood their own position as under the now existing totem law, they could have taken wives of different totems of descent each in their own group, without any phratries at all. People manage their affairs thus in all totemic parts of the world where there are no phratries, though, for what we know, phratries may have existed, and vanished, in these places, when their task was ended.
Again, phratries die out, we repeat, even in America and Australia. In some regions of Australia their place has been taken by the opposed matrimonial classes, prohibiting marriage between mothers' and sons', fathers' and daughters' generations. That arrangement, as it is not found in the most primitive Australian tribes, which have only phratries and totems, must be later than phratries and totems. It was a later enactment, within the phratry, and, as among the Arunta and Wiraidjuri, it has now superseded the phratry. The matrimonial classes, originally introduced within each pre-existing phratry, now regulate marriage, among Arunta and Wiraidjuri, and the phratry has dropped off, its name being unknown, like the flower which has borne its fruit.
Again, in Australia, as has been said, we shall try to show that phratries, in many tribes, are perhaps a borrowed institution, not an institution independently evolved everywhere. That is rendered probable because, among many tribes, the phratry names survive but are now meaningless, yet these same phratry names possess, or have recently possessed, a meaning in the language of other tribes, from whom the institution may apparently (though not necessarily) have been borrowed with the foreign names of each phratry.
For all these reasons, phratries seem, in some regions, to be a device adopted, by some tribe, or tribes, at a given moment, for a given purpose (peace), and borrowed from them by some other tribes, or propagated by emigrants into new lands. Men might borrow the names of the phratries, or might use other names which were already current designations of their own local groups. The purpose of the phratry organisation, I argue, may have been the securing of peace and alliance, and the movement may have been originated, somewhere in Australia, by two powerful local groups of animal name; in one vast region known as Eagle Hawk and Crow, Mukwara and Kilpara, and by other names of the same meaning. Such I take to have been the mode in which phratries arose, out of the alliance and connubium of two local groups, say Eagle Hawk and Crow; or of more than two groups. Mr. Frazer says that the Moquis of Arizona have ten phratries (quoting Bourke, Snake Dance, p. 336) and the Wyandots have four; the Mohegans have three.[8] These, or other groups, took the lead in recognising the situation, namely, that brides might be peacefully exchanged among local groups becoming conscious of common kinship in their totems by descent.
Meanwhile, in the various otherwise animal-named members of local groups Eagle Hawk and Crow—in the men and women within local groups Eagle Hawk and Crow who were Snipes, Lizards, Opossums, and so on, by maternal descent—we have the forerunners of the totem kins within the phratries of to-day. In the same way, members of all other adjacent local groups could also come into Eagle Hawk and Crow phratries by merely dropping their local group-names, keeping their names by descent.
We have not, on this system, to imagine that there were but two totem groups in each district, at the beginning (a thing unlikely to happen anywhere, still less always and everywhere), and that many of their members, hiving off, took new totem names. Our scheme gives us, naturally, and on Mr. Darwin's lines, first, many small local groups, perhaps in practice exogamous; then these local groups invested with animal names; then, the animals become totems, sanctioning exogamy; then by exogamy and female descent, each animal-named local group becomes full of members of other animal names by descent; then an approach to peace among all the groups naturally arises; then pacific connubium between them all, at first captained by two leading local groups, say Crow and Eagle Hawk (though there is no reason why there should not have been more of such alliances in a tribe, and there are traces of them),[9] and, lastly, the allies prevailing, the inhabitants of a district became an harmonious tribe, with two phratries (late local groups), say Eagle Hawk and Crow, and with the other old local group-names represented in what are now the totem kins within the phratries. This arrangement, in course of time, is perhaps even borrowed, foreign phratry names and all, by distant groups hitherto not thus organised.
This scheme, it will be observed, is in harmony with what Mr. Howitt's knowledge of native life shows him to have occurred. From the beginning, in the physical conditions of Australia, no horde or communal mob could keep together, for lack of supplies. No assemblage "could assume dimensions more than that of a few members," before it was broken up by economic causes.[10] There were thus, in a district, many small groups, not, as on Dr. Durkheim's theory, just two groups, broken out of a larger horde by their unexplained religious devotion each to its own god, an animal, say Eagle Hawk for one group, Crow for the other. On the other hand, there was now an indefinite number of small local groups, each of animal name, each containing members of as many names of descent as the local groups from which each local group had taken wives. Such groups would now be larger than mere hearth-circles, in proportion as improved skill in fishing, net-making, spearing, and trapping animals, and in selecting and cooking edible vegetables and roots, with improved implements, enabled larger groups to subsist in their territorial area. This scheme is manifestly consistent with the probable economic and social conditions, while the animal group-names are explained by the necessity under which the groups lay to differentiate each other by names. The regard later paid to the name-giving animals as totems is explained, on the ground of the savage theory of the mystical quality of names of unknown origin, names also borne by animals, powerful, wise, mysterious creatures.
These processes must have occupied long ages in evolution.