Tradition, Principally with Reference to Mythology and the Law of Nations

by Baron John Francis Arundell Arundell of Wardour

Mr M’Lennan struggles vainly for universal facts on which to build, and seems to find one in what he has termed exogamy (i.e. marriage outside the tribe), combined with the capture of wives and the infanticide of female children within the tribe. Impossible! If this state of things had been universal, the human race would have exterminated itself long before “the historic period!” The theory necessarily supposes that some tribes were addicted to these practices, whilst others were not. Exogamy, therefore, is not a universal fact; but neither could endogamy have been, for “the conversion of an endogamous tribe into an exogamous tribe is inconceivable,” p. 146. But as Mr M’Lennan is as much constrained to choose between exogamy and endogamy as was Mons. Jourdain between poetry and prose, he apparently elects in favour of the universal primitive prevalence of exogamy, i.e. he supposes mankind to have commenced under conditions which would have ensured its proximate extinction.

Mr M’Lennan (p. 144) says, “the two types of organisation (viz. exogamy and endogamy) may be equally archaic;” but it is evident that he inclines to the opinion that exogamy is the more archaic; and his analysis at p. 142, commencing with “Exogamy Pure, No. 1, and continuing on to ... Endogamy Pure, No. 6,” is “the analysis of a series of phenomena which appears to form a progression” (141).

Moreover, the difficulties which I have just urged will immediately recur if we allow “the two types to have been equally archaic.”

The supposed exogamous tribes, according to the theory, enforcing the infanticide of female children, and not permitting marriage within the tribe, must have been wholly dependent upon the endogamous groups for their women. These latter groups must either have succumbed, and so have become speedily extinguished through the loss of their women (for they could not have acquired others who were not of their stock, without ceasing to be endogamous); or they must have resisted successfully, and even if the matter went no farther, the exogamous tribes must have died out or abandoned exogamy; or the endogamous tribes must have resisted and retaliated, in which case we should have this further complication that they themselves would have ceased to be endogamous, and without any reason or necessity for becoming exogamous; for with the seizure of the females of the exogamous tribes, or even, under the special circumstances, with the recovery of their own, the element of “heterogeneity” would have been introduced, and the system of endogamy would have been no longer true in theory, or possible in fact. All these results must have been immediately consequent upon the first collision, which from the very conditions of exogamy, must have occurred at the outset! Postulating exogamy, it must therefore rapidly have extirpated or absorbed every other system, and yet it could never have stood alone.

Mr M’Lennan himself allows that wherever “kinship through females, the most ancient system in which the idea of blood relationship was embodied” (148) was known, there would have been a tendency among the exogamous groups to become heterogeneous, and that thus “the system of capturing wives would have been superseded.”[43] In other words, exogamy would have become extinct. But if “kinship through females” was not discovered by the first children of the first mothers, how was it subsequently discovered? We are given no clue except that “the order of nature is progressive!”

This compels the remark that if Mr M’Lennan fails to prove that exogamy was universal, as a stage of human progress, or, to use a phrase of his own, “on such a scale as to entitle it to rank among the normal phenomena of human development,” there is nothing to exclude the likelihood of its being much more satisfactorily and directly traced as the result of degeneracy. Mr M’Lennan should clear his ground by demonstrating that the circumstances exclude the possibility of this conjecture.

On the contrary, and on his own showing, they would appear much more certainly to affirm it. Although exogamy is the earliest fact which he believes to be demonstrable by evidence, he assumes an initial promiscuity; and seems to see his way out of this initial promiscuity through the system of “rude polyandry” (when one woman was common to a determinate number of men unrelated) as distinguished from “regulated polyandry” (where one woman was common to several brothers). It must be noted that before these polyandrous families, if we may so call them, at first necessarily limited, could theoretically or in fact have become the tribal exogamous groups, many difficulties must be disposed of, and many stages traced, of which we are told nothing more than that we are “forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous” (p. 226). That these families, if it is not an abuse of terms to call them so, could not have become tribal by grouping, Mr M’Lennan himself maintains, p. 232.

The two systems which Mr M’Lennan distinguishes as “rude” and “regulated polyandry,” are so essentially different that I fail to trace the possibility of progression from one to the other. “Rude polyandry” is barely distinguishable from promiscuity, and not at all if we regard it as only promiscuity, necessarily limited through infanticide, or other causes destroying the balance of the sexes. The latter has peculiar features—arising in some way out of, and fixed in the idea of the relationship of brothers—an idea which it is just conceivable might arise directly out of a state of promiscuity—where theoretically the children might be supposed to be in contact with the mother only, but which the system of “rude polyandry,” by introducing conflicting and complicated claims, would immediately tend to weaken and obliterate.

Let us see, then, if we can trace the custom better on the lines of degeneracy.

If we start with the belief in the existence of many primitive ceremonies and regulations we may then suppose that in the downward progression to promiscuity, the stages of the descent will be traceable in the corruptions of these customs. Such surmises at least are as good as the contrary surmises of Mr M’Lennan.