Serpent-Worship, and Other Essays, with a Chapter on Totemism

by C. Staniland Wake

A custom still prevalent among the New Zealanders may be cited in illustration. The Reverend Richard Taylor says: “Sometimes the father simply told his intended son-in-law he might come and live with his daughter; she was thenceforth considered his wife, he lived with his father-in-law, and became one of his tribe or hapu to which his wife belonged, and in case of war was often obliged to fight against his own relatives.” Mr. Taylor adds, that so common is the custom of the bridegroom going to live with his wife’s family, that it frequently occurs; when he refuses to do so, she will leave him, and go back to her relatives.[275] When the wife left her father’s house to reside with her husband he had to purchase the privilege by giving her father and other relations handsome presents.[276] As among the New Zealanders, children belonged to their father’s family, the fact of the wife going to reside among her husband’s relations meant the loss by her father’s family of the children. The presents may, therefore, be supposed to represent the price given by a man for his wife’s offspring to her relations. This opinion is confirmed by reference to the marriage customs of a West African people. Mr. John Kizell, in his correspondence with Governor Columbine, respecting his negotiations with the chiefs in the River Sherbro, says: “The young women are not allowed to have whom they like for a husband; the choice rests with the parents. If a man wishes to marry the daughter, he must bring to the value of twenty or thirty bars to the father and mother; if they like the man, and the brother likes him, then they will call all their family together, and tell them, ‘we have a man in the house who wishes to have our daughter; it is that which makes us call the family together, that they may know it.’ Then the friends inquire what he has brought with him? the man tells them. They then tell him to go and bring a quantity of palm wine. When he returns, they again call the family together; they all place themselves on the ground, and drink the wine, and then give him his wife. In this case, all the children he has by her are his, but if he gives nothing for his wife, then the children will all be taken from him, and will belong to the woman’s family; he will have nothing to do with them.”[277]

Mr. Taylor says that the ancient and most general way of obtaining a wife among the New Zealanders was “for the gentleman to summon his friends, and make a regular taua, or fight, to carry off the lady by force, and ofttimes with great violence.”[278] A fight also took place if, when a girl was given in marriage, the friends of another man thought he had a greater right to her, or if she eloped with some one contrary to her father’s or brother’s wish. Even if all were agreeable, “it was still customary for the bridegroom to go with a party, and appear to take her away by force, her friends yielding her up after a feigned struggle; a few days afterwards, the parents of the lady, with all her relatives, came upon the bridegroom for his pretended abduction; after much speaking and apparent anger, it ended with his making a handsome present of fine mats, &c., and giving an abundant feast.”[279] In this case the affair ended in the same manner as the African marriage already referred to, and the idea was no doubt the same in both—the giving of compensation to the parents and relations of the woman for the loss sustained by them through her offspring being removed from the family group; probably the widespread custom of pretended forcible marriage was originally connected with the rights of the woman’s relations, although sometimes the capture is due to the desire to obtain for nothing what could otherwise be acquired only by a purchase fee.

What those rights are may be ascertained from the information given us by Mr. Morgan as to the privileges and obligations associated with the membership of a gens. Among them is an obligation not to marry in the gens, mutual rights of inheritance of the property of deceased members, and reciprocal obligations of help, defence, and redress of injuries. “The functions and attributes of the gens,” says Morgan, “gave vitality as well as individuality to the organisation, and protected the personal rights of its members,”[280] who, as being connected by the ties of blood relationship, may be regarded as forming an enlarged family group, or rather a fraternal association based on kinship.

The gens would, however, form too large a group for ordinary social purposes, and a smaller group would be composed of those more immediately allied by blood. Thus, although theoretically the effects of a deceased person were distributed among his gentile relations, yet Morgan admits that “practically they were appropriated by the nearest of kin.”[281] Among the Iroquois, if a man died leaving a wife and children, his property was distributed among his gentiles in such a manner that his sisters and their children, and his maternal uncles, would receive the most of it. His brothers might receive a small portion. An analogous rule prevailed when a woman died. The property remained in the gens in either case,[282] although its division was restricted to a small number of gentiles. It could not have been otherwise where the members of the gens are numerous or widely distributed. The same principle would apply in relation to rights over children, who in a low social stage are looked upon in the light of property. Among the aborigines of America each gens had personal names that were used by it alone, and, says Morgan, a gentile name conferred of itself gentile rights. Now, although a child was not fully christened until its birth and name had been announced to the council of the tribe, its name was selected by its mother with the concurrence of her nearest relatives. Morgan says nothing of any right of the gens over the marriage of its members, and it would seem not to have any voice in the matter. The formation of the alliance is usually left to the two individuals more immediately concerned or to their near relations,[283] and the marriage price belongs to the parents and near kin of the wife. This, in the absence of the marriage price, would be the case also with the children born of her marriage, on the principle that “children are the wealth of savages.” Reference to the custom of blood revenge confirms the view that, for certain purposes, a smaller family group than the gens is recognised by the peoples having that organisation. Mr. Morgan thinks the practice of blood revenge had “its birthplace in the gens,” which was bound to avenge the murder of one of its members. He says further that it was “the duty of the gens of the slayer, and of the slain, to attempt an adjustment of the crime before proceeding to extremities.” It rested, however, with the gentile kindred of the slain person to decide whether a composition for the crime should be accepted, showing that they were considered the persons more immediately concerned. The crime of murder is, as Mr. Morgan says, “as old as human society, and its punishment by the revenge of kinsmen is as old as the crime itself.”[284] This is hardly consistent with the preceding statement that the practice of blood revenge had its birthplace in the gens. It preceded the development of the gens, and originated with the smaller family group which, as we have seen, is more immediately connected with property and children and the marriage of its female members. Those who are liable to the obligations of the law of blood revenge in any particular case must be identified, and, as they can hardly comprise all the members of the gens, we must suppose them to be restricted to the smaller group consisting of near blood relations. Judging from what we know of the habits of the Australian aborigines in relation to the lex talionis, we cannot doubt that the persons subject to retaliation in any particular case are well defined.

The example of the Polynesian Islanders, who are said not to have risen to the conception of the gens, shows that before this was developed, not only was the lex talionis recognised, but the law of marriage and the rights of parents over their children were fully established. These are, therefore, not dependent on the gens, but are incidental to a simpler group of blood relations—that on which the gens itself is based. The idea of “brotherhood” is at the foundation of all these early social organisations. Mr. Morgan says, in relation to the Iroquois phratry, that “the phratry is a brotherhood, as the term imports, and a natural growth from the organisation into gentes. It is an organic union or association of two or more gentes of the same tribe for certain common objects. These gentes were usually such as had been formed by the segmentation of an original gens.”[285] So also, a gens forms a fraternal association, as it consists of “a body of consanguinei descended from the same common ancestor, distinguished by a gentile name, and bound together by affinities of blood.”[286] If we trace the ascent until we come to the common ancestor, we shall have a group of kinsmen who compose the simplest form of “brotherhood,” that of a parent and his or her children. Originally this would be a mother and her daughters, as when the sons formed marriage associations the daughters only and their children would be left under the parental roof. It is evident, therefore, that the primitive family cannot have originated within the gens or clan. On the contrary, the clan was based on the family or group of kinsmen, without which it could not have existed. Moreover, it by no means follows that, because the common ancestor of the members of the gens or clan was a female, the primitive group of kinsmen had not a male as well as a female head. Considered as a “fraternal association,” the father may have been excluded, but for the purposes of the brotherhood it was of no importance whether paternity was certain or uncertain. The result would have been the same in either case. For other than brotherhood purposes kinship to the father may have been fully recognised. The obligations of the lex talionis, the right to property, and the control of children in marriage, may have concerned only the kinsmen by the mother’s side, but those on the father’s side may have been equally affected by the law of marriage. That such was the case I have sought to establish elsewhere, as evidenced by the classificatory system of relationships, and that view is confirmed by various facts showing that kinship by the male side is fully recognised among savages.

I have already had occasion to refer to Mr. M’Lennan’s admission that, if “marriage was, from its beginning, monogamous, kinship would certainly (human nature being as it now is) have been traced through fathers, if not indeed through fathers only, from the first.”[287] Mr. Herbert Spencer, although apparently thinking that promiscuity in the relations of the sexes was originally extensive, yet supposes that it was accompanied by monogamic connections of a limited duration. He says that “always the state of having two wives must be preceded by the state of having one,” and he looks upon the preference for the maternal kinship rather than paternal kinship as a habit, arising from the fact that the former is observed in all cases, whilst the latter is inferable only in some cases.[288] Mr. Spencer’s admission that where the system of female kinship now subsists, “male parentage is habitually known, though disregarded,” greatly weakens his position, the more so as we are not told why or when it is disregarded.[289] Mr. Morgan goes far towards supplying an explanation of the fact, although his theory is defective. He affirms that gentile kin were superior to other kin only because it conferred the rights and privileges of a gens, and not because no other kin was recognised. “Whether in or out of the gens, a brother was recognised as a brother, a father as a father, a son as a son, and the same term was applied in either case without discrimination between them.”[290] Mr. Morgan does not, however, admit of certainty of paternity, although he states that “they did not reject kinship through males because of uncertainty, but gave the benefit of the doubt to a number of persons—probable fathers being placed in the category of real fathers, probable brothers in that of real brothers, and probable sons in that of real sons.”[291] This explanation is plausible but insufficient, if, as Mr. Morgan says, descent in the female line is only a rule of a gens.[292] In this case, female descent cannot have existed before the gens, and recognition of kinship through the father may have subsisted prior to the formation of the gens, together with that of the relationship between mother and child on which such descent is founded. This would seem to be required by the facts mentioned by Mr. Morgan in relation to the social institutions of the American aborigines. He says “an Indian tribe is composed of several gentes developed from two or more, all the members of which are intermingled by marriage, and all of them speak the same dialect. To a stranger the tribe is visible and not the gens.”[293] Originally, therefore, the tribe consisted of two gentes, that is of the descendants from two female common ancestors, and, as the gentes are not visible to a stranger, we must suppose that the tribe originally represented the male head of the primitive family group to which the female common ancestors belonged. On this supposition the primitive group consisted of a male and two females, the former being the recognised representative of the group, although the descent of its members is traced through the latter. This view is quite consistent with the explanation I have elsewhere given of the classificatory system of relationship, which undoubtedly requires the full recognition for certain purposes of blood relationship through both the father and the mother.

The conclusion thus arrived at is confirmed by what we know of the opinions entertained by peoples among whom the gentile organisation is fully developed. Carver, as quoted by Sir John Lubbock, states that among the Hudson’s Bay Indians, children always take the name of their mother. The reason they give for this is, “that as their offspring are indebted to the father for their souls, the invisible part of their essence, and to the mother for their corporal and apparent part, it is more rational that they should be distinguished by the name of the latter, from whom they indubitably derive their being, than by that of the father, to which a doubt might arise whether they are justly entitled.”[294] The reason given by the Hudson’s Bay Indians why children are called after their mothers shows that the system of female kinship is quite consistent with the recognition of kinship through the male. No doubt the mother is regarded by savages as having a closer physical relationship to her child than their father, but it is incredible to suppose that the latter could ever be looked upon as having no closer relationship to it than a stranger in blood. If the mother had several husbands the actual paternity may not be certain, but, as the father must be one of several well-ascertained individuals, the paternity is only rendered less certain, and the child may be regarded as having several fathers, and claim kinship through them all. If they are sons of the same father, that kinship will be with the same persons as though its mother had but one husband. Under the conditions I have supposed, however, where a woman takes, as her husband, a man who lives with her among her own relations, there would not be any uncertainty as to paternity, and therefore the stronger relationship supposed between mother and child must have originated in the close physical connection observed to subsist between them. This does not, however, explain the origin of clan relationship based on kinship through females only, which is connected with the fact of the members of a woman’s clan possessing certain rights over her and her children. These rights would not be affected, even if the primitive custom of the woman continuing to live among her relations after marriage were departed from. Before this took place, the system of female kinship would have become firmly established, and it would be confirmed, although it could not be originated, by the idea that, as the wife may not be faithful to her husband, there is more certainty about maternity than paternity.

The fact that a man’s heirs are usually his sister’s children, shows that consanguinity is of great importance in the eyes of uncultured peoples, and what has been advanced is quite sufficient to account for that fact without assuming the existence of a state of promiscuity in the relations between the sexes. Such a state is not consistent with the abhorrence which even savages show to the marriage of persons of near blood relationship, and it has no support at all in the observed phenomena of savage life. The punalua custom of the Polynesian Islanders, which has its counterpart among the Todas of the Neilgherries, and traces of which may perhaps be found, on the one hand, in the fraternal polyandry of the Tibetans, and, on the other hand, in the sororal polygamy of the North American aborigines, is neither promiscuous nor incestuous in the proper sense of these words. The possession by several brothers of wives in common, who may themselves be sisters, or by several sisters of husbands in common, who may be brothers, may, as I have elsewhere suggested, have originally been due to the feeling that marriage has a spiritual as well as a physical significance. Punalua was really an application of the idea of brotherhood to marriage, and it is not surprising that, among uncultured peoples, the having wives or husbands in common should be considered a high mark of friendship.

It is important to notice that among the peoples who have developed or perfected the gentile institution, a rule of which is descent in the female line, the husband is the head of the household, and the wife little more than a servant, so long as they continue to live together. It is true, as Lahontan states,[295] that the wife has the same power of divorce as the husband, but so long as she remains in his cabin she is treated by him as a drudge and a mere child-bearer. As women they have some influence in the tribe, but this is only when they have children to give them dignity. The Polynesian Islanders not having risen to the conception of a gens, it is, perhaps, not surprising that woman is usually regarded by them as an inferior creature. Her position as a woman is, however, better than that of a wife, in which capacity she is cared for as little as among the American aborigines. Her condition is mitigated only under the influence of the Areoi Institution, and where she enters into the punaluan engagement. If it is true, as Mr. Morgan states, that “the Australians rank below the Polynesians, and far below the American aborigines,” we cannot wonder that the position of woman among the Australian aborigines is one of great inferiority. In fact, among them wives are considered as articles of property, and not only do they suffer great privations, but they are most barbarously treated. The last-named people practice the simplest form of obtaining wives, that of capture by cunning and personal violence, but in most of their tribes descent is in the female line, and the gens or clan is developed more or less perfectly. And yet the Australian aborigines possess marriage regulations which seem formed for the express purpose of preventing the intermarriage of blood relations, and which fully recognise kinship by the male line.

A modern French writer of great authority, Fustel de Coulanges, affirms that the ancient family was constituted chiefly by religion, the first institution of which was marriage. The family gives rise to the gens, and “with its elder and younger branches, its servants and dependents, formed possibly a very numerous group of persons.” Such a family, says de Coulanges, “thanks to the religion which maintained its unity, thanks to its special privileges which rendered it indivisible, thanks to the laws of protection which retained its dependents, formed in time a widespread society under an hereditary chief.”[296] This view of the primitive family possesses much truth, although it leaves out of sight one of the most essential features of the family among uncultured peoples. The same may be said in relation to the patriarchal family of Sir Henry Maine. This writer says that “the earliest tie which knitted men together in communities was consanguinity or kinship,” and that “there was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers, except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact.”[297] He adds, that “kinship, as the tie, binding communities together, tends to be regarded as the same thing with subjection to a common authority.” The notions of power and consanguinity are blended, a mixture of ideas which is seen “in the subjection of the smallest group, the family, to its patriarchal head.”[298] “This group,” says Sir Henry Maine, “consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves, land and goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest male of the eldest ascending line, the father, grandfather, or even more remote ancestor. The force which binds the group together is power. A child adopted into the patriarchal family belongs to it as perfectly as the child naturally born into it, and a child who severs his connection with it is lost to it altogether.” The patriarchal family of Maine thus differs from the ancient family of de Coulanges in its binding force, which in the one case is power, and in the other religion, forces which are, nevertheless, reconciled by the fact that the chief element in this religion is the ancestral idea which is at the base of the patriarchal family. This view of the nature of the ancient family would be complete if it provided for the fact, revealed by the study of primitive institutions as now exhibited among uncultured peoples, that descent was originally traced by the female line in preference to the male line. The defect thus revealed will, however, be removed if it can be shown, as I have endeavoured to do, that descent through the male is, for certain purposes, recognised equally with that through the female. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his “Principles of Sociology,” refers,[299] as follows, to a suggestion made by Mr. Fiske, which contains an important truth bearing on the subject of this paper: “Postulating the general law that, in proportion as organisms are complex, they evolve slowly, he infers that the prolongation of infancy which accompanied development of the less intelligent primates into the more intelligent ones, implied greater duration of parental care. Children, not so soon capable of providing for themselves, had to be longer nurtured by female parents, to some extent indeed by male parents, individually or jointly; and hence resulted a bond holding together parents and offspring for longer periods, and tending to initiate the family. That this has been a co-operating factor in social evolution is very probable.” The bond thus formed shows its influence even among the lowest savages, in the natural affection which subsists between a mother and her children, when these escape the not unusual fate of infanticide. Natural affection is less operative with male parents, but there are other feelings which have relation chiefly to male children which tend to form an equally binding tie. Mr. Spencer remarks that “to the yearnings of natural affection are added, in early stages of progress, certain motives, partly personal, partly social, which help to secure the lives of children, but which, at the same time, initiate differences of status between children of different sexes. There is the desire to strengthen the tribe in war; there is the wish to have a future avenger on individual enemies; there is the anxiety to leave behind one who shall perform the funeral rites and continue oblations at the grave.”[300] These motives must have been influential from the earliest period at which mankind consisted of more than a few small and isolated groups, and, therefore, we must assume that in these groups the male element was equally as strong as the female element, if, indeed, they had not a male head. Mr. Spencer remarks further that those motives, “strengthening as societies passed through the earlier stages, gradually gave a certain authority to the claims of male children, though not to those of females.”[301] These ideas are quite inconsistent with the notion that the family group ever consisted only of a female ancestor and her children, or that the woman was originally the head of, and supreme in, the family. The custom of tracing descent by the female line shows, however, that for certain purposes the woman occupied an important position, although it may, when the practice of wives going to reside among their husband’s relations become established, have tended to confirm that of female infanticide, as the children would be lost to the mother’s family group. One of the motives referred to by Mr. Spencer would, after the idea of special kinship through females had become established, affect more especially the persons bound together by a maternal tie. Where the gentile organisation is established the duty of revenging private injuries is confined to the other members of the common gens. The duty of defence against the external enemy belongs, however, to the tribe, which here undoubtedly stands in the place of the original family group, in which both male and female kinship, with their special duties, was recognised, represented by its male head. This group we must suppose, therefore, had much in common with Sir Henry Maine’s patriarchal family. Under the head of the oldest living male ancestor, it embraced wife or wives, children and dependents. The repugnance to marriages between blood relations, which seems almost instinctive to man, would prevent such alliances between the members of the group. The male children, when they reached the age of manhood, would leave the paternal roof, and obtain wives from other groups, with which they would become associated on the principle of adoption, while, on the other hand, young men from other groups would take their places as the husbands of the female children. It would be during this primitive period that the idea of a special relationship subsisting between a mother and her children, on which the custom of tracing descent through the female is founded, would become formed, as already mentioned. The importance attached to female kinship would be increased by the development of a fraternal feeling among the children of the same mother, a feeling which would be strengthened if, as would probably not seldom be the case, men, after some years of cohabitation with their wives, left their children solely to the mother’s care. Under the influence of these various ideas and circumstances the custom of tracing kinship for certain purposes in the female line would be developed by the time that the habit had been formed of wives leaving their parents to reside among their husband’s family. As when this took place, the custom would be firmly established under the influence of polygamy, the development of the gentile organisation would almost necessarily follow. The primitive idea of kinship through the father would, however, still remain in full force with the attributes which originally appertained to it—namely, the headship in the family group of the eldest male ancestor, whose authority is practically represented by the tribe, and the non-intermarriage of those thus connected.