Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/175

 The Origin of Exoga7ny and Toteniisni. 159

of the old sire. There was as yet no organised tribe : the groups preserved the ancestral jealous hostility. This can neither be proved nor disproved, but the hostility is the keystone of my arch.

As to primal hostility of groups, it is a curious fact that, in the Banksian island of Mota, the two veve, (or intermarry- ing phratries), " in the old days . . . hated one another, and even now there is a feeling of hostility between the two. . . . There are a number of customs of avoidance which receive their most natural explanation as evidence of this old feeling between the two divisions."' ■* Given hostility, to obtain wives from each other, men, on m\- theory, had recourse to robbery.

I would add, that if brothers and sisters were allowed to make love to each other, (and the boys to their mother, which seems hardly conceivable), the family circle must, on occasion, have been broken up by murders and revenges, red revenge between sire and son, brother and brother. No small society could have lived if such amours were permitted. Man had thus good human reasons for slaying such amorists; otherwise capital punishment is all but unknown to savage law.

I next suppose the local groups to have come to dis- tinguish each other by names derived usually from animals, more rarely from plants, for totem kins are so distinguished. For my reasons and my answers to objections I must refer to my books. Social Origins, and The Secret of the Totem (pp. 114-34). Of this later book I reprint what seems necessar\- : a few passages need alteration.

The establishment of totemic beliefs and jjractices cannot have been sudden. INIen cannot have, all in a moment, conceived that each group possessed a protective and sacred animal or other object, perhaps of one blood

■» W. H. K. Rivers, "The Father's Sister in Oceania," Folk-Lore, vol. xxi., p. 55. The Haida intermarrying sets, according to Mr. Swanton, hate each other bitterlv.