Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/79

 Rh can be derived from the ideas and practices now dominant.

The side of totemism on which the discoveries of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have broken most seriously into our previous conceptions is that of social organisation. Hitherto all the totem-clans known to science had an invariable rule against marriage between men and women who belonged to the same clan and bore the same totem. This rule the Arunta totally disregard. Their marriage-regulations are founded upon a different principle. Formerly, indeed, if we may trust their traditions of the Alcheringa, the Arunta did observe the clan-system. But then they observed it in topsy-turvy fashion, for the practice was, they say, for the men and women of the same clan to intermarry. Now, however "primitive" some of the institutions of the Arunta may seem, and may indeed be, others have travelled a long way from any state capable of being so described. Progress is hardly ever, if ever, made equally on all lines. It is one of the most ordinary phenomena to find a people relatively advanced in one direction and relatively backward in another. The Arunta, I venture to think, are an instance of unequal progress. Students who hold that the traditions of the Alcheringa—that mythical time of the early ancestors of the tribes—enclose tangible facts, must also hold that the same traditions are evidence of progress. For my own part, I am slow to affirm that many grains of fact (in the sense of actual occurrences) can be extracted from such ore. Some can, of course; but the ore requires a deal of milling and washing to separate them. Still, the traditions are undeniable witness to the belief of the Arunta in their own progress. How else are we to interpret the stories of what I may term the evolution of men and women out of the rudimentary beings whom they call Inapertwa, the introduction of various rites, and the establishment of the