If it be said that, because a man calls his wife his Noa, and also calls all women whom he might have married his Noa, therefore all these women, in past times, would have been his wives; it might as well be said that all the women whom he calls "mother" would, in times past, have collaborated in giving birth to him. As far as these terms indicate relationship, "a man is the younger brother of his maternal grandmother," and the maternal grandfather of his second cousin!45 The terms do not denote relationship in blood, clearly, but something quite different.
The custom of Piraungaru, or Pirrauru, and cases of license at festivals, and the names for tribal relations, are, we repeat, the only arguments in favour of the theory of the communal horde.46 We have shown that the terms of relationship do not necessarily help the theory. That theory, again, is invalidated by its inability to account for the origin of the rules forbidding marriage between persons of the same phratry (for it does not tell us why the original medicine man conceived the idea of regulations), or even to account for the origin of the phratriac divisions.
But why, on our system, can the Piraungaru custom break the rule of individual marriage more easily than the law prohibiting incest? Why it can do so on the theory of pristine promiscuity we have explained (p. 41, supra).
We reply that individual marriage has not, among savages, any "religious" sanction; it is protected by no form of the phratry or totem tabu; by no god, such as Hymen; but rests, as from the first it rested, on the character and strength of the possessor of the woman or women, and falls into abeyance if he does not choose to exert it. If the males of the Urabunna have so far departed from the natural animal instincts as usually (with exceptions) to prefer to relax their tenure of women, being tempted by the bribe of a legalised change of partners all round, they exhibit, not a primitive, but a rather advanced type of human nature. The moral poet sings: —
"Of Whist or Cribbage mark the amusing Game,
The Partners changing, but the Sport the same,
Then see one Man with one unceasing Wife,
Play the long Rubber of connubial Life."47
This is the "platform" of the Urabunna and Dieri, as it is of the old Cicisbeism in Italy, and of a section of modern "smart society," especially at the end of the ancien régime in France. Man may fall into this way of thinking, just as, in Greece, he actually legalised unnatural passions by a ceremony of union. "That one practice, in many countries, became systematised," as Mr. J. F. McLennan wrote to Mr. Darwin.48
This is not the only example of a legalised aberration from nature, or from second nature. Abhorrence of incest has become a law of second nature, among savage as among civilised men. But Dr. Durkheim publishes a long list of legalised aberrations from the laws of incest among Hebrews, Arabs, Phœnicians, Greeks, Slavonic peoples, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Cambodians, and Peruvians.49 If these things, these monstrous aberrations, can be legalised "in the green tree," why should not jealousy fall into a kind of legalised abeyance among the Urabunna, under the law of partner-shifting? The Piraungaru custom does not prove that earliest man was not ferociously jealous; it merely shows that certain tribes have reached a stage in which jealousy is, at present, more or less suppressed in favour of legalised license.
We catch the Urabunna and Dieri at a moment of development in which the abandonment of strict possession of a wife is compensated for by a legalised system of changing partners, enduring after the feast of license is over. But even so, a man is responsible, as father, for the children of his actual wife, not for the children of his Piraungaru paramours. For these their actual husbands (Tippa Malku) are responsible.
Mr. Howitt says, in his earlier account of this institution, that among the Dieri, neighbours of the Urabunna, the men and women who are made Pirauru are not consulted. The heads of the tribe do not ask whether they fancy each other or not. "The time is one of festivity, feasting, and amusement," only too obviously! "Dancing is carried on." "A man can always exercise marital rights towards his Pirauru, if they meet when her Noa (real husband) is absent, but he cannot take her away from him unless by his consent," except at the feasts. But the husband usually consents. "In spite of all this arrangement, most of the quarrels among the Dieri arise out of this Pirauru practice… "A son or daughter regards the real husband (Noa) of his mother as his Apiri Muria, or "real father"; his mother's Pirauru is only his Apiri Waka, or "little father." At certain feasts of license, such as intertribal marriages, "no jealous feeling is allowed under penalty of strangling, but it crops up afterwards, and occasions many bloody affrays."50 Thus jealousy is not easily kept in abeyance by customary law.
The idea of such a change of partners is human, not animal, and the more of a brute the ancestor of man was the less could he dream, in times truly primitive, of Piraungaru as a permanent arrangement. Men, in a few tribes, declined into it, and are capable of passing out of it, like the Urabunna or Dieri man, who either retains so much of the animal, or is rising so far towards the Homeric standard, as to fight rather than let his wife be allotted to another man, or at least to thump that other man afterwards.
The Dieri case of the feast of license, just mentioned, is notable. "The various Piraurus (paramours) are allotted to each other by the great council of the tribe, after which their names are formally announced to the assembled people on the evening of the ceremony of circumcision, during which there is for a time a general license permitted between all those who have been thus allotted to each other." But persons of the same totem among the Dieri may not be Piraurus to each other, nor may near relations as we reckon kinship, including cousins on both sides.
In this arrangement Mr. Howitt sees "a form of group marriage," while I see tribe-regulated license, certainly much less lawless than that of the more advanced Fijians or the Arunta. Mr. Howitt did not state that the Pirauru or Piraungaru unions are preceded (as marriage is) by any ceremony, unless the reading the banns, so to speak, by public proclamation among the Dieri is a ceremony.51 Now he has discovered a ceremony as symbolic as our wedding ring (1904).
Little light, if any, is thrown on these customs of legalised license by philology. Mr. Howitt thought that Pirauru may be derived from Pira, "the moon," and Uru, "circular." The tribal feasts of license are held at the full moon, but I am not aware that, by the natives, people are deemed peculiarly "moonstruck," or lunatic, at that season. If Urabunna Piraungaru is linguistically connected with Dieri Pirauru, then both Piraungaru and Pirauru may mean "Full Mooners." "Thy full moons and thy festivals are an abomination to me!"52
Among the Dieri, "a woman becomes the Noa of a man most frequently by being betrothed to him when she is a mere infant… In certain cases she is given by the Great Council, as a reward for some meritorious act on his part." "None but the brave deserve the fair," and this is "individual marriage," though the woman who is wedded to one man may be legally allotted as Full Mooner, or Pirauru, to several. "The right of the Noa overrides that of the Pirauru. Thus a man cannot claim a woman who is Pirauru to him when her Noa is present in the camp, excepting by his consent." The husband generally yields, he shares equivalent privileges. "Such cases, however, are the frequent causes of jealousies and fights."53
This evidence does not seem, on the whole, to force upon us the conclusion that the Urabunna Piraungaru custom, or any of these customs, any more than the custom of polyandry, or of legalised incest in higher societies, is a survival of "group marriage" – all men of certain social grades being actual husbands of all women of the corresponding grades