Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

The general practice was that the youth must seek his bride from another recognised family (gens or totem) of the tribe. To choose her from his own immediate family was a crime of such deep dye that even an Australian savage “could not consider such a thing possible”; although, in later conditions, this artificial barrier was often weakened.[249]

In matriarchal systems, the husband usually went to live with the gens of the wife, but did not become a member of it. He was looked upon as a stranger and an interloper. Among some Australian and American tribes, he never spoke directly to his wife’s mother, or even looked at her. His children did not acknowledge him as a blood-relation, and when he grew old and useless, he had to look to his own family, not to his own offspring, for his maintenance.

The origin of these strange usages was strictly religious. They have been analysed as they existed in many nations by one of the ablest of German ethnologists, and their source has been shown to be that the gods of the one gens never willingly accept the introduction of a stranger into the household except by the regular formulas of adoption, which would prevent marriage; hence, the husband is, and ever remains, a foreigner and an interloper in the matriarchal household. His wife’s god is not his god, nor are her people his people.[250]

The actual ceremony of marriage itself often indicates this. Much has been said by writers on ethnology of “marriage by capture,” and it is often asserted to be that most usual among primitive peoples, and to continue in survivals in higher conditions of culture.

There is, indeed, very frequently a ceremony which presents the appearance of violently seizing and carrying away by main force the bride-elect. But it is not to be understood as the reminiscence of a time when the man went forth and snatched a girl from some neighbouring tribe to become his slave and his wife. I doubt if in the true totemic marriage, considered as distinct from concubinage, any such method was practised. It is not so to-day, even among the Australian Blacks. If they steal a woman, they first inquire as to her kinship, and if she belongs to a class into which her captor cannot marry, according to the laws of his clan, he sets her free.[251]

The so-called “marriage by capture” was either a recognised tribute to maidenly coyness, by which her real or feigned resistance was to be overcome in a manner creditable to herself,—a sentiment constantly witnessed in the lower animals as well as in modern life; or it was a method of conciliating her household gods, the deities of the gens, by giving the appearance of constraint and succumbing to force on the part of the girl. Some of the northern tribes of America carried these notions to the extent of a pretended concealment of the marriage long after it had been performed. The husband was obliged to enter the home of his wife by night and secretly. To approach it in daytime or to be seen in her company would have been a grave impropriety.[252]

The second primitive form of marriage is by purchase. This also is far less usual than many writers have assumed. There is indeed, very commonly, as in civilised society, an exchange of goods along with or previous to the marital ceremony. But with us it is not regarded as a purchase and sale when an American girl’s father gives his daughter and a million to a foreign nobleman in exchange for the title conferred on the bride. It may in reality be a mere commercial transaction, but in theory it is not so.

Just as little is the “marriage by purchase” among most of the aboriginal tribes, where we find it in vogue. The exchange of goods is often a form of compensation to the household gods for the privilege of remaining a member of the clan, or for the permission to enter its ranks as an authorised resident.

Of course, women were bought and sold as any other commodity; they were part of the booty of victors, and were dispensed as gifts, or kept for enjoyment. But when we confine ourselves to the examination of the strictly totemic marriage we find even among the wildest tribes that it was generally founded in mutual liking, that it was contracted under the sanction of the recognised family laws, and that its ritual was that of a religious ceremony.[253] The poor Bushmen, even, believe that the laws relating to marriage are of divine origin, enacted by the sacred ant-eater, and that their infraction will be severely punished.[254]

The gifts which accompanied the rite were in the nature of offerings. Ceremonies of lustration and purification, in which the sacred elements, fire and water, took a prominent part, were general, and the relationship established was in its essence one of religious significance, and not one of mere secular import.