Ancient society

by Lewis Henry Morgan

Although this question of personal names branches out in many directions it is foreign to my purpose to do more than illustrate such general usages as reveal the relations of the members of a gens. In familiar intercourse and in formal salutation the American Indians address each other by the term of relationship the person spoken to sustains to the speaker. When related they salute by kin; when not related “my friend” is substituted. It would be esteemed an act of rudeness to address an Indian by his personal name, or to inquire his name directly from himself.

Our Saxon ancestors had single personal names down to the Norman conquest, with none to designate the family. This indicates the late appearance of the monogamian family among them; and it raises a presumption of the existence in an earlier period of a Saxon gens.

VII. The right of adopting strangers into the gens.

Another distinctive right of the gens was that of admitting new members by adoption. Captives taken in war were either put to death, or adopted into some gens. Women and children taken prisoners usually experienced clemency in this form. Adoption not only conferred gentile rights, but also the nationality of the tribe. The person adopting a captive placed him or her in the relation of a brother or sister; if a mother adopted, in that of a son or daughter; and ever afterwards treated the person in all respects as though born in that relation. Slavery, which in the Upper Status of barbarism became the fate of the captive, was unknown among tribes in the Lower Status in the aboriginal period. The gauntlet also had some connection with adoption, since the person who succeeded, through hardihood or favoritism, in running through the lines in safety was entitled to this reward. Captives when adopted were often assigned in the family the places of deceased persons slain in battle, in order to fill up the broken ranks of relatives. A declining gens might replenish its numbers, through adoption, although such instances are rare. At one time the Hawk gens of the Senecas were reduced to a small number of persons, and its extinction became imminent. To save the gens a number of persons from the Wolf gens by mutual consent were transferred in a body by adoption to that of the Hawk. The right to adopt seems to be left to the discretion of each gens.

Among the Iroquois the ceremony of adoption was performed at a public council of the tribe, which turned it practically into a religious rite.[64]

VIII. Religious rites in the gens. Query.

Among the Grecian and Latin tribes these rites held a conspicuous position. The highest polytheistic form of religion which had then appeared seems to have sprung from the gentes in which religious rites were constantly maintained. Some of them, from the sanctity they were supposed to possess, were nationalized. In some cities the office of high priest of certain divinities was hereditary in a particular gens.[65] The gens became the natural centre of religious growth and the birthplace of religious ceremonies.

But the Indian tribes, although they had a polytheistic system, not much unlike that from which the Grecian and Roman must have sprung, had not attained that religious development which was so strongly impressed upon the gentes of the latter tribes. It can scarcely be said any Indian gens had special religious rites; and yet their religious worship had a more or less direct connection with the gentes. It was here that religious ideas would naturally germinate and that forms of worship would be instituted. But they would expand from the gens over the tribe, rather than remain special to the gens. Accordingly we find among the Iroquois six annual religious festivals, (Maple, Planting, Berry, Green-Corn, Harvest, and New Years Festivals)[66] which were common to all the gentes united in a tribe, and which were observed at stated seasons of the year.

Each gens furnished a number of “Keepers of the Faith,” both male and female, who together were charged with the celebration of these festivals.[67] The number advanced to this office by each was regarded as evidence of the fidelity of the gens to religion. They designated the days for holding the festivals, made the necessary arrangements for their celebration, and conducted the ceremonies in conjunction with the sachems and chiefs of the tribe, who were, ex officio, “Keepers of the Faith.” With no official head, and none of the marks of a priesthood, their functions were equal. The female “Keepers of the Faith” were more especially charged with the preparation of the feast, which was provided at all councils at the close of each day for all persons in attendance. It was a dinner in common. The religious rites appertaining to these festivals, which have been described in a previous work,[68] need not be considered further than to remark, that their worship was one of thanksgiving, with invocations to the Great Spirit, and to the Lesser Spirits to continue to them the blessings of life.

With the progress of mankind out of the Lower into the Middle, and more especially out of the latter into the Upper Status of barbarism, the gens became more the centre of religious influence and the source of religious development. We have only the grosser part of the Aztec religious system; but in addition to national gods, there seem to have been other gods, belonging to smaller divisions of the people than the phratries. The existence of an Aztec ritual and priesthood would lead us to expect among them a closer connection of religious rites with the gentes than is found among the Iroquois; but their religious beliefs and observances are under the same cloud of obscurity as their social organization.