Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/504

472 climatic conditions acting upon the necessities of the people and their pre-existing belief in the power of magic. These have given an extension and a special application of a purely local character to the totemic ceremonies. The primary, the "fundamental significance" of the totemic ceremonies is not magical but religious, using that term in a wide sense. This conclusion is strengthened when we see that the Intichiuma ceremonies are performed in respect of totems like the sun, the evening star, stone, darkness, flies, and mosquitoes. The authors admit the difficulty of understanding their performance. Difficult it is indeed to understand if we assume that the Intichiuma are part of the primitive stock of customs. But if they be simply a special development of the totemic rites, called forth by the local circumstances, it is easy to suppose that they have been also applied by mistaken analogy on the part of the Arunta to totems which, from the native point of view, do not really stand in need of magical influence for their increase, or which are, like flies and mosquitoes, positively objectionable.

Other considerations point to the same result. This is not the place to argue the priority of father-right or mother-right. It must suffice to say that group-marriage can hardly arise, though it may for a while persist, under father-right. It is found in the fullest force where mother-right, as among the Urabunna, bears sway, though even there it has begun to yield to individual marriage. Under father-right it is bound to decay and ultimately disappear. This is the case with the Arunta. They retain the relationship-names of classes, though in practice marriage is exclusively individual, except for some special occasions. It is not clear that all the exceptions indicate former group-marriage, though probably all arose during mother-right. Even in the relationship-names the Arunta show signs of progress which are not found in the more northerly tribes. For example, they have learned to distinguish in the class of wife's mothers the actual mother, whom they call tualcha-mura, a word for which there is no equivalent in the Warramunga or Binbinga speech, nor (if I understand rightly) in those of the coastal tribes.

Relics of female kinship (mother-right) are found in the northern tribes which are not found among the Arunta. The Arunta father has the disposal of his daughter's hand; but "in the Warramunga, Tjingilli, Gnanji, Binbinga (as to this, however,