The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

PECULIARITIES OF THE SPECIES HOMO SAPIENS

astray, a rather superfluous woman from another family group or the woman of a group whose head man was slain or enfeebled, she went in equal measure for the straying young man. If we are to suppose that the older males were in the habit of attacking and often killing the young ones, the probability of such superfluous women is increased. Atkinson represented the young man as always attacking and Overpowering the sway women, but then he wrote a quarter of a century ago when a certain veil of modesty hung about feminine desire and enterprise. Attack may not have been necessary. The young man brought the Strange woman home to the tribe or to the outskirts of the tribe, or she came with him without being brought, his own woman. Less typically she beguiled him towards her parental hearth—her man. If she was the stranger and came into his group, naturally she looked up to him ; he was her chosen, and she did not yield to the old man. The family women did not want her as an equal and a rival; they were on the young man’s side against any interference with this pleasant acquisition of his on the part of the Old Man. They were willing to set a tabu between her and the Old Man. If, on the other hand, the man went to the woman’s family group, equivalent tabus would become necessary.

Now all this is very plausible theorizing indeed, and in support of it we find tabus of practically world-wide extent that are entirely consistent with it,

Out of such crude and obvious occasions which probably presented themselves with wide variations among the Hominide and were repeated millions and millions of times in the course of tens of thousands of years, and out of these instances of the successful grafting of a stranger on the group, exogamy

marriage by the acquisition of strange

mates) would have crept into existence almost imperceptibly, and a second fundamental tabu between mother-in-law and son-in-law, and between daughter-in-law and father-in-law have arisen.

Such in its essentials is Atkinson’s guess at the method by which the extension of the primordial family group to the proportions of a tribe was attained. It is a guess, a theory, but there is a great mass of fact to keep it in countenance. It explains most plausibly a change in social habit which would have been extremely advantageous to man in certain phases of climatic change to which we will presently advert.

Throughout the world everywhere tabus

and customs occur that are strictly in accordance with this theory of Atkinson’s, and which are explicable in no other way. First come the incest tabus that are woven into the fabric of every human society. Biologically they are unique, purely human and universally human. And they are not instinctive ; they can fail to be established, or they can be broken down. There have been exceptions to these tabus. The Pharaohs could Marry incestuously and so could the Incas of Peru, and there is no evidence that they made any difficulty about it. Indeed, only their incestuous offspring were legitimate and could succeed to the throne. But here, and in similar exceptions, we seem to be dealing either with extreme sophistications or with the-heirs to the sexual freedoms of the Old Man and not with the normal marriage of the sons of the patriarch. Even into the twentieth century the sexual restrictions upon royalty have been different from those of other sections of the community. The scions of many royal houses were not bound by Marriages contracted with women below their rank and could commit with impunity what was for lowlier men the crime of bigamy. The royal families of Europe up to the Great War constituted a very closely intermarrying system. Such exceptions confirm rather than disprove the general thesis. They show that the objection to incest is not innate and instinctive but a fundamental tabu, and that it is something less binding upon the ruler than upon the commonalty. The morality of the head man, the patriarch, was not that of the son.

Throughout the world now, even in the most isolated and savage communities, the incest tabu holds. No variety of human association is known that ignores it. The primitive man-ape family-tribe, whose mental conflicts laid the foundations of all our present social organizations, has gone altogether, leaving only its traces in our minds, customs and institutions. In the English prayer book we recall the most fundamental of all human institutions when we read the prohibited degrees of affinity. In less civilized and presumably more primitive communities we find a far-reaching system of “avoidance”? tabus which are clearly intended to hedge about and strengthen the essential tabu. The woman of the Siberian Ostyaks must not appear before her father-in-law nor her husband before his mother-in-law until they have children and the woman must muffle her face against her father-in-law throughout life ; the Buriaks, Kalmucks, Altaian Turks,

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