Chapter XV (1)

THE COUVADE AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF THE BLOOD-TIE--CONCLUSION OF THE INQUIRY INTO THE THEORY OF THE LIFE-TOKEN.

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In the last three chapters we have discussed some savage customs founded on the belief that the members of a kin are parts of an entire body and connected with one another by an indissoluble tie, so long as they remain members of that body and are not cut off by formal expulsion or renunciation, either with or without union to another similar body. Many other practices are derived from the same notion. I select a few of them for notice in the present chapter.

Prominent among them is the custom to which the name of the Couvade has been given: a name too deeply rooted now to be changed, albeit one founded on a mistake as to the use of the word and a limitation, untenable on scientific grounds, though inevitable in the then state of our knowledge, to certain remarkable developments of the usage. Dr. Tylor was the first to examine the custom in a critical manner. Since the publication of his _Researches into the Early History of Mankind_, it has been considered by numerous anthropologists, notably by Dr. Ploss, Dr. {401} Wilken, Mr. im Thurn, and more recently by Dr. von Dargun and Mr. Ling Roth; while Dr. J. A. H. Murray in his letters to _The Academy_ has once for all disposed of the evidence for its existence in modern Europe and for the use of the word by the Béarnese, or by any French writers of authority, as a technical term in describing the alleged Béarnese custom. Mr. Ling Roth’s comprehensive paper on the subject happily relieves me from the necessity of dealing with it at length here.[401.1]

The Couvade as generally explained is the custom which requires the father of a child, immediately after its birth, to lie-in as if he were a woman in childbed, while his wife, who has actually given birth to the babe, goes about her ordinary work, and of course waits upon her husband in his feigned sickness. But this definition is inadequate and misleading. In order to attain a true conception of the custom it is not enough to limit our observation to a small number of cases and in those cases to regard only the most prominent phenomena, because they strike us as the most ridiculous. We must clear our minds of the notion that the father takes the mother’s place, in the sense, at all events, that he is made to undergo the treatment she is entitled to, and at her expense. Whether from living a more active and open-air life than her more civilised sisters, or from physical causes more deeply seated, the ease with which a savage woman gives birth is much more like that of a wild beast. She will often deliver herself without aid; and, subject to the ceremonial rules of the tribe concerning {402} uncleanness, in a very little time she is ready to return to her usual occupations. Simulation of her sufferings, not to say disregard of them, by the husband is therefore in most cases out of the question.

Moreover, the lying-in of the husband, so far as it can be so termed, is only part of a large number of observances, by which he is bound, in the more fully developed forms of the custom, from the moment his wife conceives, or occasionally before, until the child is able to speak, or to digest the usual food of the tribe; and in many of these observances both before and after childbirth the wife is included; while she on her part is bound by other observances of a similar character. Thus, Signor Modigliani, sojourning with a native of Nias whose wife was in “an interesting condition,” was the innocent cause of an amusing domestic squabble. For his host in leaving his room one day stepped across the traveller’s outspread legs. This was a serious matter, because it was apt to cause misfortune to the unborn child. The wife did not fail to remind her imprudent husband of his folly, and carried her anger to such a height that he was glad to flee from the blows administered by means of the firewood intended for the domestic hearth. Nor was the quarrel made up without a gift from the traveller of one of his bags of rice. While staying at the house Signor Modigliani frequently obtained from the natives by barter serpents for his collection; and this was a continual cause of difficulties to his host, who was divided between his curiosity and desire to assist at the transaction on the one side, and on the other his dread of the consequences of seeing a dead snake--consequences only to be averted by running away at once to find and burn a living one. At length, however, Signor Modigliani {403} convinced him that it would be enough, when he found a snake, to seize it and simulate burning by passing it over a fire kindled for the purpose, and then to kill it in some other manner, as by suffocating it in alcohol for scientific purposes. Other acts too the Niasese father-expectant must avoid, as talking with Malays or Chinese, lest the child be unable to speak his own tongue, splitting a piece of wood or the _atap_-leaves wherewith the houses are roofed, lest the infant be born with harelip, eating of a pig found dead, lest the fœtus be born without attaining proper development, killing or cutting up chickens or pigs, lest the babe feel the wounds, eating of the great beetles of which the natives are very fond, lest the little one catch a cough. As reported by other travellers, both parents must abstain before the birth from some of these acts, as well as from passing over a spot where a man has been murdered, or a buffalo slain, or where a dog has been burnt for the purpose of giving effect to certain imprecations, else the child will be affected by the contortions of the dying man or beast. Nor dare they build a house, or thatch it, nor drive nails; and before breaking tobacco or siri it must be drawn out of the bag which contains it, or the babe cannot be born. They look in no mirror or bamboo-tube, lest the child squint. They eat no _bujuwu_ (a kind of bird) or owl, lest he croak or whoop instead of speaking. They touch no monkey, lest the infant get eyes and forehead like a monkey’s. They enter no house where a corpse lies, else he will die. They eat of no pig killed for a funeral feast, lest he get the itch. They plant no _pisang_-trees, lest he suffer from ulcers. The consequence of eating a certain fish or striking a snake is indigestion to the child, of expressing or boiling-out oil is headache to him, of passing {404} over a place struck by lightning is to make his body black, of firing a field for agricultural purposes, or throwing salt into the pig’s food, or of swearing, is sickness to him; and to eat out of the vessel in which the food is cooked is to cause the babe to adhere to the after-birth.[404.1]

This long list exhausts not the prohibitions in force on the island of Nias; but we may treat it as a sample not merely for that one island but for many other places, and pass on to a few instances of rules imposed at and after the time of delivery. On the Melanesian island of Saa, both before and after the birth, the father “will not eat pig’s flesh, and he abstains from movements which are believed to do harm, upon the principle that the father’s movements affect those of the child. A man will not do hard work; he keeps quiet lest the child should start, should overstrain itself, or should throw itself about as he paddles.” In the Banks’ Islands when the child is born both parents eat only what it could digest. “After the birth of the first child, the father does no heavy work for a month; after the birth of any of his children he takes care not to go into those sacred places into which the child could not go without risk.” In the New Hebrides “he does work in looking after his wife and child, but he must not eat shell-fish and other produce of the beach, for the infant would suffer from ulcers if he did. In Lepers’ Island the father is very careful for ten days; he does no work, will not climb a tree, or go far into the sea to bathe, for if he exert himself the child will suffer.”[404.2] Turning to the American continent, we will take the report of the latest traveller in the interior of Brazil, Dr. Karl von den Steinen. Here let it be noted that the father is so far {405} from imitating childbed, that the mother is, all over South America, usually delivered on the ground, whereas the father lies in his hammock. So it is among the Schingù Indians visited by Dr. von den Steinen. Their opinion was that the father lay in the hammock because he was obliged to fast, and that he took care of the child because he was obliged to remain at home, while the mother went out to her work, rather than from any intention to simulate the natural conduct of the mother. The father it is who cuts the navel-string; and he is not a free man until the string falls off the child. By these and other American peoples fish, flesh and fruit are tabooed to the father expressly on the ground that for him to eat them is all one as if the babe itself ate them. Among the Ipurina he is forbidden to taste tapir-flesh or pork for a whole year. On the other hand, what very much astonished the worthy apothecary of the Brazilian military colony, the Bororó father, when his child is sick, is in the habit of himself taking the medicine provided for the patient. The Bororó father and mother eat nothing for two days after the birth; and on the third day they may only take warm water: if the father ate anything both he and the infant would sicken. The mother, though she attends to her work, must not bathe until her menstruation has returned. The Paressí parents remain in the hut for five days, until the navel-string falls off; and the father is only allowed to taste water mingled with _beijú_, otherwise the baby would die.[405.1] The humorous accounts of the practice among the Tamanacs and Abipones, quoted at length by Dr. Tylor from the Abate Gilij and the Jesuit missionary Dobrizhoffer, need only be referred to here to emphasise the reason given in {406} both cases, namely, that the abstinence described is for the benefit of the offspring. To partake of certain food, to kill any animal, to sneeze, or to commit some other act, would injure the little one.

Readers who have followed the facts and arguments in the earlier chapters of this volume set forth will have no difficulty in arriving at the true interpretation of the usage. It is founded on the belief that the child is a part of the parent; and, just as even after apparent severance of hair or nails from the remainder of the body, the bulk is affected by anything which happens to the severed portion, so as well after as before the infant has been severed from the parent’s body, and in our eyes has acquired a distinct existence, he will be affected by whatever operates on the parent; and, conversely, the parent will feel whatever happens to him, as in some parts of England a mother absent for a while from her child is believed to feel her breasts painful when he cries.[406.1] The separation is only in appearance; the connection is preserved in spite of it. Hence whatever the parent ought for the child’s sake to do or avoid before severance it is equally necessary to do or avoid after. Gradually, however, as the infant grows and strengthens he becomes able to digest the same food as his parents, and to take part in the ordinary avocations of their lives. Precaution then may be relaxed, and ultimately remitted altogether. But the observance is attended with inconveniences. The parents’ labour is required in hunting, in agriculture, in warfare, in all the various ways in which the {407} life of a household or of a tribe is maintained. The custom therefore is liable to gradual diminution. It is worn away slowly, and compressed into a shorter period. With the tardy and half-unconscious recognition of natural laws it loses bit by bit its importance, until it fades away into little more than a ceremony. In spite of decay, however, and indeed in consequence of it, it may acquire another significance; and among a few tribes, as, for example, the Mundurucus, it becomes “the legal form by which the father recognises the child as his.” This result would have the effect of renewing its vitality. The change of intention is rare, and where the custom is found in its fullest development it is unknown. Accordingly, I venture with all respect to think it is a mistake to see in this legal form the origin of the Couvade, as Dr. Tylor has done, plausible though the explanation seems. Its origin really lies deeper; it lies in the widely pervasive conception of life I have endeavoured to exhibit in these chapters on the Life-token.

This mode of accounting for the practice may seem defective in that it fails to explain the martyrdom suffered by the Carib father, as detailed by Du Tertre. After the unfortunate father has endured a course of fasting for forty days the relatives and best friends, we are told, are invited to a feast, which they preface by scarifying him with agouti-teeth, and then having mashed in water sixty or eighty grains of strong pimento, or Indian pepper, they wash his wounds with the infusion. Not a sound, however, must be drawn from him by his agony, if he would not be deemed a coward and despised by all.[407.1] In like manner, among the aboriginal inhabitants of Celebes, if the first-born be a son the mother bathes the child in the nearest water-course, while the {408} father, fully armed and dressed in his finest garb, awaits her return. In his turn he then goes to bathe, and when he steps out of the water his neighbours are waiting for him to beat him with reeds all the way back to his dwelling. On arriving there, he seizes his bow and shoots three reed arrows over the hut, saying: “I wish much happiness to my son: may he grow up to be a valiant man.”[408.1] I do not know whether the Carib ceremony was performed on the birth of a girl, but the Minahassee ceremony is entirely omitted; and the extreme severities of the Carib fast were at all events confined to the first child. The object of the Minahassee father is unquestionable; and from it we may infer that of the Carib. In his person his son undergoes the first tests of his endurance, valour and skill. Success in this is doubtless the guarantee of the child’s courage and of his value to the tribe as hunter and warrior.

If this be so, the Carib tortures, it is evident, spring from the same root as other observances comprehended under the general name of the Couvade. Both in the Carib and Minahassee forms we find the tendency to emphasise the birth of the first child, or perhaps I should rather say, to relax the requirements in the case of after-born children. The tendency is not to be looked upon as a recognition of heirship, but as one arising naturally in the course of ceremonial decay. The first child is the most important; for it is a pledge of the continuance of the family or kindred, and brings very often an accession of honour, or at least of consideration, to its parents. Among peoples where conjugal fidelity is imperfectly developed, moreover, it is the one of whose parentage the father is best assured, and consequently the one on whose health and strength his {409} conduct will be likely, if not certain, to have influence. Thus the motives for the care of the offspring, and therefore for the special observance of all precautions, concentrate upon the first child; and if the custom be found irksome, or for any other reason be liable to loosen its hold, it will generally continue to be fully observed in respect of the first child, long after it has begun to fall into neglect on subsequent births.

The racial and geographical distribution of the practice is a more difficult question than it might at first sight appear, considering the number of authorities who have examined it. If we limit not the definition of the Couvade to the cases where the father actually lies down, but extend it, as it seems proper to do, to all those where he has before as well as after the birth to observe various taboos, in which the mother is often included--then we may find either the custom itself or relics of it over the greater part of the world. America, inhabited by a homogeneous race, displays it everywhere, even among the Eskimos of Greenland, save apparently in Tierra del Fuego. On the eastern continent Mr. Ling Roth puts the matter somewhat strongly when he says that it “is only met with in isolated and widely separated localities.” In Australia it is unknown; nor is there any record of it among the extinct Tasmanians. Summing up the facts, the same writer says: “The custom does not appear to exist or to have existed among those people to whom the term ‘most _degraded_’ is erroneously applied, people which were better described as savages living in the lowest known forms of culture, such as the Australians, Tasmanians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Veddahs, Sakeys, Aetas, and Fuegians. Neither does the custom exist among the so-called civilised portion of mankind. In {410} other words, Couvade appears at first sight to be limited to peoples who hold an intermediate position between those in the highest and those in [the] lowest states of culture. As such it may be said to represent an intermediate or transition state of mental development.”

We have no need to be surprised that the Couvade is not found in the lowest stage of savagery. The reckoning of kinship through the mother only, and the stories and superstitions which attribute impregnation to other causes than coition, point alike to an imperfect recognition in archaic times of the natural fact of fatherhood. It may further be suggested that where the claim of a father upon his child is still rather that of owner than of begetter, the recognition of the counter-claim of the child upon the father, and the application as between father and child of the belief underlying and directing other magical practices, will not yet have developed. It is probable, indeed, that the customs we include under the generic name of the Couvade would begin with the mother, and that when the fact of paternity was completely recognised, although legal kinship may not yet have come to be reckoned through the father, they would be extended to him. Their disappearance as men advanced in civilisation would, like that of all other customs, be a gradual one; and if they had become at all general we should be likely to discover relics of them among nations in the higher ranks of culture. Accordingly, although there is no authentic record of the existence of the masculine childbed in modern Europe, a number yet lingers of superstitions only referable to the Couvade. For example, just as in the island of Celebes we found the Minahassee father performing a rite intended to secure to his son the qualities of bravery and skill, so among the Esthonians the {411} father runs rapidly round the church during the baptismal service, that his child may be endowed with swiftness of foot.[411.1] In Altmark the mother busily reads her Bible and hymn-book while the child is being baptized, so that he may be able to learn easily; and with the same object the godparents must repeat together after the minister the passages from the Bible he brings into his exhortation.[411.2] The husband among the mixed population of East Prussia seems to have been limited in his choice of drink while his wife was lying-in.[411.3] Over a wide area of the Continent the mother is allowed to do very little work before her churching. In Altmark she must not spin; for in spinning she will wet her finger with her saliva, and that will cause the babe to slaver.[411.4] The reason assigned in Switzerland for a similar taboo is that she will spin the material for a rope for her child.[411.5] At the baptismal feast in Altmark the mother must taste of all the dishes if she wish the infant to thrive.[411.6] Galician Jews permit no member of a household where there is a young child to stay out after sunset, else the little one will be deprived of its rest.[411.7] In the last illustration we have an extension of the superstition beyond the immediate parents--an extension of which there are traces among savage peoples, like the Abipones, who are reported to have put other relatives as well as the parents upon restricted diet during a baby’s illness.

An interesting form of this extension has been referred to by Dr. Tylor in the third edition of the important work {412} in which he discusses the Couvade, where he notes that in Germany “it is believed that the habits and proceedings of the godfather and godmother affect the child’s life and character. Particularly, the godfather at the christening must not think of disease or madness lest this come upon the child; he must not look round on the way to church lest the child should grow up an idle stare-about; nor must he carry a knife about him for fear of making the child a suicide; the godmother must put on a clean shift to go to the baptism, or the baby will grow up untidy, etc. etc.”[412.1] I have already mentioned another instance from a land which, to-day at all events, is German in language and polity. There the duty of godparents is exactly parallel with that prescribed for the mother. So too it is held in the Erzgebirge and in Thuringia that the godfather must eat of all the dishes at the feast, for the babe will get a dislike to those left untasted; and in Thuringia he must not only not look about him in returning from church, but he must hasten back to the house, that the child may learn the sooner to run.[412.2] In the Sollingerwald each of the godparents must hold the babe for a little while; but the youngest of them presents it at the font, doubtless to ensure it a longer life.[412.3] In the Upper Palatinate even the priest’s conduct at the baptism will affect the child. If he stumble or stutter during the reading of the service, {413} the consequences are serious: the boy will become silly, the girl a nightmare; or if he leave a word out, the infant will never rest quietly in bed, but will be found feet uppermost. In Bohemia, the priest in stumbling as he reads will cause the child to talk in its sleep.[413.1] In the province of Posen, forgetfulness or mistake on the part of the priest results as in the Palatinate; and the only remedy is rebaptism.[413.2] The superstition, as we see, is not confined to Germany, though it may be more fully developed there than elsewhere; and without delaying upon examples drawn from Germany and Germanised lands, I proceed to cite a few from other countries before closing what I have to say on the Couvade. Among the Huzules, to have a Gipsy as godparent is to be lucky in horse-breeding and horse-dealing; and by the same people it is considered that if there be a difficulty in putting out the godparents’ candles after the service, the little newly made Christian will have a long life.[413.3] The peasantry of the Valsesia at the foot of Monte Rosa deem that if the godparents do not recite the creed with a clear voice the little one will stammer all its life. And whoever carries it to the church to be baptized must on no account look back, or the babe will always be timid and easily frightened.[413.4] In Provence on the other side of the Alps, as well as in Germany and Belgium, the opinion is widely prevalent that the child will resemble, morally and physically, his godparents. Hence great anxiety as to the choice of these important personages. They must be healthy in mind and body, and without any physical defect; for if either of them should be one-eyed, a stammerer, bandy-legged or a hunchback, nobody, in Provence at least, doubts {414} that the poor baby would suffer the like misfortune.[414.1] In Central France, if a godfather wish his godson to become an excellent and indefatigable singer, he has a ready way to realise the wish; for he has only to set the bells ringing full peal during the baptismal service, and the longer and more vigorously they dance and swell, the more skilful will the neophyte become in striking up an air or in leading a jig. The godfather, however, must not forget on leaving the church to imprint a chaste kiss on both cheeks of the godmother, else there is too much reason to fear the boy will grow up dumb, or at least a stammerer.[414.2] In the _arrondissement_ of Corte, on the island of Corsica, if either of the sponsors forgets a single word in reciting the creed, the child becomes a wizard or witch, or else a _mortolaio_, that is to say, a ghost-seer.[414.3] The latter result also follows in Friuli;[414.4] while the Irish peasantry hold that if either of the sponsors fails to repeat _verbatim_ after the priest the prayers and promises, the child will always have the power to see fairies or ghosts--which is reckoned unfortunate.[414.5] Among the Walloons the omission by the priest of certain of the sacramental words seems to have a similar effect.[414.6] It is a superstition scattered over a large part of Italy that if the priest make any mistake in the baptismal service, or omit to comply with every ritual prescription in baptizing a girl, she will become a witch;[414.7] and that stupidity or stammering will be the consequence of defects in the recitation {415} of the creed or prayers by the _padrini_ is also commonly believed.[415.1]

The fact is that in the popular mind sponsorship creates a new and real kindred between the godparent and the god-child, and not only between the godparent and god-child, but between the godparent and the godchild’s relations. The effect seems analogous to that of the blood-covenant. Among the wandering Gipsies of southern Hungary a rite similar to that of the blood-covenant is actually performed. The day when the child’s hair is first cut is kept as a festival. The godparents let some drops of their blood fall into a glass of brandy and some on a small piece of bread. The father then pours the brandy on the child’s head and crumbles the bread upon it, “that the child may grow and thrive.” In the same way when the tortures of the Carib father came to an end, the infant was sprinkled with some drops of blood from his wounds, with the object, we are told, of imparting his courage and spirit. So, too, some of the wandering Gipsies of northern Hungary wrap the babe after its birth in rags bedropt with some of the father’s blood.[415.2] The object in all these cases is to unite the child in the closest bond with the person whose blood is shed. Even where that person is the father himself the rite may perhaps be regarded as a formal adoption into the kin. More likely it is intended to promote the growth and health of the child by renewing the corporeal union already in existence by virtue of the natural blood-tie, or of the equivalent mystical bond forged, as between sponsor and child, by the sacrament of baptism. It would then correspond to one of those periodical renewals {416} of blood-brotherhood which we have dealt with on a former page. Some countenance is perhaps given to this suggestion by a practice of the Southern Slavs. The relationship of godfather and godchild is often created among them by the formal cutting of the child’s hair, as it seems also to have been among the ancient Germans. The ceremony can only take place once. The godfather cuts the hair in the form of a cross and drops it into a cup of water, into which he puts some money as a gift for the child; and the parent then entertains him at a feast and presents him with gifts in return. As the ceremony is not distinctive of any religious denomination, Christian and Moslem do not scruple to enter into the relationship of hair-cutting sponsorship with one another. It unites the families in ties so close as to involve them in one another’s blood-feuds; and a Moslem woman unveils before her child’s godfather, though a stranger and even a Christian. But, important as are the social and political effects of such an institution, it is not to them that I desire specially to direct attention in this connection; rather I desire to compare it with the Gipsy practices just mentioned. It is in great request in Bosnia as remedial treatment for a sickly child. The child is taken to a crossway; and the first passer-by is expected to cut the hair and thus become godfather.[416.1] Here it is surely intended to enter into a new corporeal union with an entire stranger, and so acquire a fresh stock of health. The objection to this explanation is that the godparent does not seem to take the hair away with him. I do not know if we can suppose that the ceremony has undergone deterioration, and that this part {417} of the proceeding has been lost because its exact reason has been forgotten. I am unable otherwise to account for it. In any case it is unquestionable that the relationship of gossipry in many countries is fully as intimate and sacred as that of blood. Amongst the Southern Slavs, we know, a godfather or an adoptive brother is often the person chosen in preference to any one, even a natural brother, to fill the delicate office of _brautführer_ at a wedding. The Huzules regard sponsors as veritable additions to the family circle. They never choose them from among their neighbours; for there is often strife between neighbours; and strife between gossips, or persons related by the bond of sponsorship, would be a sin.[417.1] In some parts of Italy the godmother drinks at the baptismal feast out of the same cup with the mother:[417.2] clear evidence of the intimacy of their union.

One consequence of the relationship thus created is the prohibition of intermarriage. In comparatively early times the Church took over from the Roman law the interdiction of marriage between persons who were only akin by adoption. That interdiction was the direct and necessary result of the recognition of adoption as constituting a true kinship. The analogy of sponsorship at the font was too great to be overlooked; and in following the prohibition into the relationship between persons by this new tie the Church was merely reflecting the opinion of the people, who saw in it a fresh and solemn form of the adoption to which they had been accustomed from the days of savagery. Their horror of such marriages wherever sponsorship is yet a living reality may be illustrated by the superstition recorded in Berri not many years ago, that the fruit of the {418} union was not children but hairy monsters, which when disengaged from their mother’s womb would instantly take refuge under the bed, and when thence dislodged with a pitchfork would fly to the hearth, and after grinning and mowing at their persecutors for a while from the pot-hook above the hearth would eventually disappear, to the relief of every one, up the chimney.[418.1]

The custom of Adoption seems to have arisen with the appearance of the true family. The mode of admission into a totem-kin is by the blood-covenant, and the neophyte becomes a blood-brother. But when the smaller circle of the family emerges, containing only the parents and their descendants either by monogamic or polygynic marriage, adoption by the head of the family of a child from without is found a convenient means of recruiting its numbers. For a long time adoption into the family goes on side by side with admission by blood-covenant into the kin. The object of both rites, though similar, is not identical, inasmuch as the bodies into which admission is obtained are not the same. The blood-covenant, therefore, is not ousted by adoption, and only tends to disappear with the abandonment of the clan-organisation. In fact, in the custom of Adoptive Brotherhood it has continued among the Slavs to the present day. Adoption seems to attain its greatest strength where what we may term legal kinship is reckoned only on one side, whether through the father only or the mother only. When legal kinship comes to coincide with natural kinship the circle of the kin widens, and the organisation of society changes, so as to render less needful the strengthening of the family by adding artificially to its numbers; testamentary rights come into existence; the {419} feeling of natural kinship dominates the legal idea; and kinship by adoption ultimately vanishes. For this reason Adoption is unknown to the English law, and the same may probably be said of other modern nations, notwithstanding their ancestors may have practised it, even where their law is an ancient system, adapted from time to time to the development of national requirements, and not based upon a revolutionary subversion of older institutions.

The ceremony of Adoption is sometimes found as a simulation of the act of birth, at other times as suckling or a simulation of suckling. Diodorus relates a legend of the adoption of Herakles by Hera which doubtless exhibits the ceremony as practised by the prehistoric Greeks. The scene, it will be remembered, is laid in Heaven; for it was to make things agreeable there after the hero’s apotheosis that Zeus persuaded his jealous and vindictive consort to take this course. We are told that Hera having gone to bed, Herakles was brought close to her body, in order to imitate a real birth; and she then dropped him down from under her clothes to the ground. The writer adds that even in his own day this was the rite of adoption observed by the barbarians;[419.1] nor have we any reason to disbelieve him, seeing that it is still practised by the Turks in Bosnia. In Dalmatia the man who intends to adopt a son (the ceremony is the same if it be performed by a woman) girds the son with one end of his girdle and himself with the other, saying in the presence of witnesses: “This is my son. I make over to him after my life my whole property.” A Slavonic folksong represents an empress as taking the son {420} to be adopted into the palace and passing him through her silken vest that he might be called her heart’s child.[420.1] Here we are reminded of a mediæval usage at weddings in France and Germany. In the former country a canopy, or veil, was (and perhaps still is) held suspended over the heads of the pair to be married while the service is being performed. It bears the significant name of _abrifou_, or fool-shelter. The Hessian practice, now extinct, was more picturesque. The bridegroom wore a large black mantle; and as he stood with his bride before the altar he flung with one strong sweep its ample folds around her, so that both of them were covered by it. If the bride, or her husband, had any child, born before marriage, and she took it there and then under the canopy or the mantle, this act was sufficient to render it legitimate.[420.2] The same usage may once have prevailed in England; for a belief is said to have lingered into recent times among “the folk” here that a mother might legitimate her children born before marriage, by taking them under her clothes during the ceremony.[420.3] Though the object of the practice is said to be legitimation, the rite is that of adoption. Legitimation and Adoption are in this connection convertible terms.

Elsewhere suckling is represented in the rite. Sir John Lubbock mentions that “in Circassia the woman offered her breast to the person she was adopting.” This was probably the form among the ancient Egyptians. At all {421} events, they esteemed the milk-tie a very sacred one;[421.1] as did the ancient Irish, with whom, and with the Scandinavians, fosterage had a sanctity equal, if not superior, to the tie of blood, without, however, involving the renunciation of the original kin.[421.2] At the present time at Kambât, in the Eastern Horn of Africa, the son to be adopted sucks blood from the breast of his adoptive father.[421.3] In Abyssinia, “if a man wishes to be adopted as the son of one of superior station or influence, he takes his hand, and, sucking one of his fingers, declares himself to be his ‘child by adoption,’ and his new father is bound to assist him as far as he can.”[421.4]

In general, the effect of Adoption was to transfer the adopted child from his own family to that of the adoptive parent. At Rome the rite included the _detestatio sacrorum_, or relinquishment of the original household, and the _transitio in sacra_, or initiation into the new worship. By these means the child was discharged from his natural family and received into the new one.[421.5] The change of worship is, in that plane of civilisation where the custom of adoption is most fully developed, of the essence of the proceeding. Its very object often is to preserve the ancestral cult by artificially providing persons to carry it on. This is the most prominent idea in the _Laws of Manu_.[421.6] Annexed to the ancestral cult was the inheritance. Whosoever performed the one was entitled to the other, or {422} at least to a share in the other. In course of time, as the duty decayed and ceased to be acknowledged, the rights of property remained: an excellent precedent for the English House of Lords in insisting on the rights of property while looking askance at its duties. The adopted child is in fact regarded exactly as a natural-born child; he obtains all the privileges, and is charged with all the duties, restrictions and disabilities of a natural-born child. He becomes of one flesh with his new parents and their other offspring, whether natural or adopted. He is entitled to support, to maintenance in his quarrels, to protection, to his fair and equal share of the inheritance. He is liable to obedience, to maintain the family quarrels, to assist in paying the family debts and obligations, to unite in the family worship; and he is debarred from marrying all whom the members of his adopted family are restricted from marrying. As a consequence, adoption can only take place with the assent of both families, or of a council of elders or some more formal tribunal on behalf of the community. Such a tribunal exercises the functions, not merely of judge of the propriety of the adoption, but also of the necessary witness to its validity. And if we do not find the formality always complied with in the punctilious manner of the Roman law, we may usually trace it with greater or less distinctness wherever the custom of adoption has obtained.[422.1]

Passing, with this hasty sketch of Adoption, away from {423} the inner circle of family relationships, let us look at one or two aspects of the wider clan-life, illustrating the strength of the blood-tie.

“The birth-ties of kindred are reckoned the only strong ones,” says Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, speaking of folksongs; and the observation might be extended with hardly any qualification to every species of tradition. The bond of blood has always proved stronger than any other force that can sway human nature, until it encounters the overmastering energy of one of the great world-religions, or becomes distracted and spent amid the complexities of modern life. Weakened as it is in Europe nowadays, it is yet not entirely dissipated. Its claims are put forth more timidly, but they are still within certain limits respected. To the utmost of those limits they are still efficient instruments in the hands of the poet, the playwright and the novelist,--and that not only on the moral side, where we are accustomed to appeals founded upon kinship, but also on what I may call the physical side. An unaccountable thrill, we are told, shoots through a father who meets unwittingly a child whom he has never seen, or has seen but for a moment long years before. This involuntary recognition of the same blood is a convention not yet wholly discarded by the writers who thus aim at affecting our emotions, because it has not quite passed out of the shadowy region bordering our clear beliefs into the limbo {424} of things that neither prescribe our action nor convince and captivate our imagination. But the Italian peasant, a thousand years behindhand, a thousand leagues deeper in the realm where faith and fancy reign in indissoluble consort on a double throne, undisturbed by the far-off frontier raids of criticism and doubt,--the Italian peasant admits the extreme demands of blood in the _vendetta_, and believes that when a bottle supposed to contain a portion of the blood of Saint Januarius “was presented to the body such joy was evinced that the blood had nearly burst from the bottle.”[424.1] If such were the conduct of blood severed for, say, fifteen centuries from the body of which it had once formed part, what may not be expected of blood still flowing in the veins of living men, themselves both parts of one body, the kin,--blood whose stream has welled from the same fount only a generation or so ago? In _The Book of the Pious_ by Jehuda ben Samuel the Pious, who lived at Ratisbon about the year 1200, a story is told, founded on the idea of the physical unity of a kindred. A rich man died while travelling abroad, having at the time of his death a large sum of money in his possession. The servant stole this money and gave himself out as his master’s son. Shortly after the rich man’s departure from home, however, a son was born to him, who, when grown up, sought the aid of the Gaon Saadja. Saadja, it appears, was an historical personage who flourished at Sura in the former half of the tenth century. He advised the youth to apply to the king; and the king commissioned Saadja to decide the matter. The Gaon, accordingly, having the son {425} and the servant both brought before him, caused a vein of each of them to be opened, and one of the bones of the dead man to be fetched from his grave. He laid the bone first in the servant’s blood, but without effect. He then laid it in the son’s blood, which it immediately sucked up; for the bone and the blood, we are told, were of one body. Saadja, therefore, gave judgment in favour of the son, directing the estate to be restored to him.[425.1]

Two other examples may be given of widely sundered peoples among whom essentially the same superstition is current. It is believed in the west of Europe--certainly in Brittany and Flanders--that the body of one drowned will bleed on the approach of a kinsman.[425.2] The Zulus speak of sympathy by the navel. It is their conviction that a man will recognise his kindred by some mysterious influence of the navel. “A man,” they say, “knows one of his blood-relations by the navel. We have been wondering at the treatment of the man by So-and-so. We thought he knew him; yet he did not know him; he sympathised with him by the navel only.”[425.3] Obviously this is the birth-tie.

The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. But to do so would be to repeat the same evidence, frequently in the same words, over and over again. I shall, therefore, give only a few of the more striking instances.

I mentioned a page or two back the extreme demands of {426} blood as found in the Italian _vendetta_. The words were only just written, when I took up the newspaper of the day, and read an account of a trial for murder arising out of a blood-feud in Dalmatia. The actors in the tragedy were not Italians, but Slavs. The facts were shortly these. Two brothers, having quarrelled with a neighbour about some goats, threw themselves upon him with their daggers; but he defended himself with his pistol, and, having killed one, was tried for murder. The jury properly acquitted him, on the ground that he was only acting in self-defence. Hardly had he left the prison when his surviving assailant, with another brother, hastened to his house. They found there only their foe’s wife and daughters; and they waited and watched. Soon they espied the acquitted man’s younger brother, a boy of fourteen, carrying a pitcher of water. Crying “The devil threw thee in our way,” they seized him, and stabbed him so quickly that he had no time even to cry out. They were speedily arrested, tried, found guilty of murder, and condemned, the one to death, and the other to eighteen years’ penal servitude. They protested against the sentence, and appealed to the Court of Cassation at Vienna. There their counsel had the assurance to plead that “in Dalmatia it is every man’s duty to take vengeance where blood has been shed; and that the people feel it right to pursue a family, one of whose members has killed a connection of their own, as long as there is a male descendant.” This was a little more than a civilised court of justice could stand; and it will be no fault of the judges if the Dalmatian savages do not learn that the unity of the kin is not a doctrine of modern jurisprudence.[426.1]

{427}

The story shows that we must regard the collective responsibility of the clan as twofold; first looking at the offended clan, and then at the offending. What Professor Robertson Smith points out concerning the Semites is universally true, namely, that when a member of the clan has been slain, the others say, not “The blood of such an one has been spilt,” but “_Our_ blood has been spilt.” The injury is felt by the entire body; and it is the business of the entire body to revenge it. Conversely, not merely the man who commits the wrong is liable for it. His whole kin is involved in the guilt, and must suffer for it until atonement shall have been made. Colonel Ellis, writing of the peoples of the Slave and Gold Coasts, lays down this rule in distinct terms. “The family collectively,” he says, “is responsible for all crimes and injuries to person or property committed by any one of its members, and each member is assessible for a share of the compensation to be paid. On the other hand, each member of the family receives a share of the compensation paid to it for any crime or injury committed against the person or property of any one of its members. Compensation is always demanded from the family instead of from the individual wrong-doer, and is paid to the family instead of to the individual wronged.” And he draws attention to the resemblance of this custom of collective responsibility and indemnification to that enunciated in the old Welsh laws.[427.1]

Happily for mankind the blood-feud is not everywhere so relentless as it is presented to us in Dalmatia. Even savages cannot afford to be for ever engaged in warfare to the death; and that is what would happen if blood were only to be wiped out by blood. The practice of commuting {428} revenge for payment has therefore very generally arisen. The distinction between crimes, as wrongs committed against the State, and private injuries classed by lawyers as torts and breaches of contract, is unknown in the lower stages of civilisation. There was at first no State, and when the State came into existence it was but loosely constituted. Public crimes were confined to treason and the like: robbery and murder were nothing more than private wrongs. Commutation for these was precisely on the same footing as for insult or debt. It was no more unnatural to take payment for the murder of a blood-brother than for a sheep; it no more interfered with the course of justice or the rights of the State than the barter for a tusk of ivory or a bag of gold-dust. To omit to pay the price of the ivory or the gold-dust was as much a wrong against a clan to which, or to one member of which, it was due, as to commit murder. The price of a murder might be heavier, or it might not. But, alike, the price of the goods or of the blood must be paid by the clan of the man indebted or offending. To draw a line between wrongs done to the clan and wrongs done to the individual required a much greater development, on the one side, of the individual, on the other side, of the State, at the expense of the clan or the family. Until that point had been reached, whenever compensation was accepted for a wrong to the kin, every member of the kin, as in the West African custom depicted by Colonel Ellis, was entitled to his share; because the wrong to the kin had reached and was shared by all. Among the Garos of Bengal, proposals of marriage must come from the woman. If a man make the first advances it is an insult, not to the individual woman, but to the whole _mahári_ (literally, motherhood) or kin, “a {429} stain only to be obliterated by the blood of pigs and liberal libations of beer at the expense,” not of the individual offender, but of the _mahári_ to which he belongs.[429.1] Going back to West Africa, we find that on the river Comoe, as on the Slave Coast, where a man of one community is indebted to a man of another community, the latter has the right to seize the goods of any member of his debtor’s community, on the ground that the group is collectively responsible for the debts of its members.[429.2] Examples might be added from every part of the globe; but they can be all summed up in the Fijian philosophy as expressed by an old resident to Mr. Fison, while explaining a bloody feud which lasted for years in reference to the shooting of a dog. “It’s just like this, sir; in a manner o’ speakin’, say as me and Tom Farrell here has a difficulty, and gets to punchin’ one another. If he plugs me in the eye, I don’t feel duty bound to hit him back azackly on the same spot. If I can get well in on him anywheres handy, I ain’t partickler. And that’s how these niggers reckons it.”[429.3]