io8 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



sented by the bards and chroniclers of patriarchal days, 

 loom in shadowy greatness out of the pre-history of 

 every Aryan race. 



If we turn to the status of men in the kindred 

 marriage group, and wish to measure its significance, 

 we must remember that its evolution is spread over 

 long centuries ; and as we near the transition to the 

 patriarchal civilisation, the power and influence of men 

 at first gradually and then rapidly increases. Yet in 

 the full bloom of the group-marriage period, their influ- 

 ence on custom and tradition must have been compara- 

 tively small, even death and disease are represented by 

 female deities, the wind, the sea, the earth, and all the 

 powers of nature 'are in the earliest folk-tradition god- 

 desses. The gods, so far as they had any existence, 

 appear to have taken the form of temporary human 

 lovers of the goddesses, the transitory male element need- 

 ful for fertility, but then destined to disappear. Man, 

 ever moulding the divine to his own pattern, creates 

 first the goddess as tribal-mother, later her son as god, 

 and only as his own institutions develop is the wandering 

 lover, 1 the hero, raised to the position and authority of 

 All-father. The male element step by step asserts itself. 



If the reader object that this scheme of a primitive 

 mother-age civilisation is far more elaborate than any- 

 thing the philologists have attempted to spin out of 

 Aryan roots, the answer must be that it is not drawn 



1 The uncertain paternity is not always even ascribed to man, but to beast 

 or bird. Compare such primeval forms as Gaea and Uranus, Helja goddess of 

 death (a much older and more widely-spread conception than the Eddie Hel, 

 daughter of Loki), the Celtic Don or Dea with her very shadowy hero-husband 

 Beli, which strike one at once amid the later elements of the patriarchal 

 pantheons. 



