GENERAL WORDS FOR SEX AND KINSHIP 155 



Fick connects the Teutonic gad with a root mean- 

 ing fit and good, and so reaches good and gut, and 

 Deecke cites a-ya06s. I am inclined to think if any 

 such relation is to hold at all which I doubt it is of 

 the inverse kind. The origin of the agreeable and fit 

 must, I think, among primitive people always be sought 

 in the notion of sex and of kin. 



The habits of the kin-group are represented by a 

 number of words associated with gat. In the first 

 place, w^e have the German vergaderung, gaderung, 

 and our English gathering, a meeting of the kin of the 

 same nature as the mahal. This vergaderung, ver- 

 gatterung, or, in a corrupt form, virgatum gehen, 

 remained as a fossil in the mediseval school fete, fre- 

 quently held on St. Gregory's Day at Niirnberg and 

 elsewhere. The children went into the woods and had a 

 common meal, which was followed by dancing and 

 singing. To give a full account, however, of this fossil 

 vergaderung of the sixteenth century would be to desert 

 philological for folklore evidence a material to which 

 I propose to return later. The vergaderung is a sex- 

 festival, another form of the mahal and the hexenmahl. 1 



The council or tribe-talk aspect of the mahal is 

 represented by a number of words connecting the gat 

 with the mark system. Thus we have gadengericht and 

 gadenrichter for the court and judge at Kotweil, and 

 Kaisersgaden was used even of the imperial judicial 

 chamber. In O.L.G. we even find gaderheren glossed 

 patres conscripti. Corresponding to the hagegeld and 



1 The relation of the judicial mahal to the sex- festival is evidenced in the 

 custom which forced the Zurzach and Oettingen Landvogts to dance under a 

 linden, or in a public place, with a common prostitute before they proceeded 

 to hold their annual courts. 



