Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/174

 158 llie Origin of Exogamy and Totemism.

l^uDJil of the Wurunjeni, or Daramulun of the Coast Murring. If they received it favourably, the next step might be to announce it to the assembled headmen at one of the ceremonial gatherings as a supernatural com- mand, and this would be accepted as true witl^out cjuestion by the tribes-people.""

But this theory postulates the modern organised tribe, with a supreme All - Father, a probouleutic council of medicine- men, a Boule of headmen, with ceremonial gatherings, and tribal consent.

To such a tribe, hitherto promiscuous, the headmen announce that, by a supernatural command, they must so arrange themselves that no man may marry his mother, nor any woman of her tribal status, nor his sister, nor any woman of her tribal status, nor any woman in his own division of the tribe. The tribe accept a proposal so con- trary to their previous promiscuit}'. But lu/ij Daramulun issued this edict, if he did, or why the medicine-man con- ceived such a curious idea, no theorist who beh'eves in this legislative action can make even a guess. A theory which postulates that, when exogamy arose, tribes were organised on the present model; a theory which postulates a decree totally bereft of any plausible motive, and conducing to no perceptible advantage to any mass or class of men, seems to me futile. It merely re-states the facts, — there is at present an exogamous division which prevents marriages of some consanguine and of many more non-consanguine people, — but why there is such a division Daramulun only knows! My theory answers the question, ciii bono f " Who has an interest in enforcing an exogamous decree? " My guess, adopted from the greatest gf naturalists, Mr. Darwin, is obliged to contradict the theory of Mr. Howitt at every point. I suppose the "primal law" of the half-brutal sire to have persisted in local groups longer, owing to the admission of sons with their alien mates, than the harem

^ The Native Tribes of South- East Atistralia, pp. 89-90.