Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/62

 said to practise, not promiscuity pure and simple, or civil promiscuity, but a religious promiscuity, analogous to that of the ancient Gnostics and the Areoïs of Tahiti. These Ansarians must doubtless have been confounded with the Yazidies, a sect of Arabs, also Syrians, practising a sort of manichæism, and who, it is said, assemble periodically every month, or every three months, in fraternal agapæ, at the conclusion of which they unite in the darkness without heed as to adultery or incest. Throughout the Syrian Orient the erotic festival of the Yazidies is called by a significant name, Daour-el-Cachfeh—the game of catching. But even if the fact were true, what does it show? Only one more aberration to the score of the phallic religions.

Here I end my enumeration. Evidently nothing very convincing results from it. The greater number of the facts that I have just quoted have either been carelessly observed, or contested, or affirmed by a single witness, or depend merely on hearsay evidence. It is prudent, therefore, to regard them with lawful suspicion, and even if certain of them are exact, we must be careful not to draw general conclusions from them. Promiscuity may have been adopted by certain small human groups, more probably by certain associations or brotherhoods. Thus the chiefs of the Namaquoi Hottentots willingly held their wives in common.

When we come to study the family we shall find that among the Kamilaroi of Australia all the women of one clan are reputed to be the wives of all the men of another. But this community is often only fictitious, and, besides, it is already regulated; it is not promiscuity pure and simple. So far, nothing proves sufficiently that there has been a universal stage of promiscuity among mankind. Some theorists have been so hasty to come to a conclusion on this point that they have gone beyond actual experience. Moreover, as I have been careful to remark, the simple fact that man is a mammalian primate weakens this hypothesis in advance, since the nearest relations of man in the animal kingdom are in general polygamous, and even sometimes monogamous.