GENERAL WORDS FOR SEX AND KINSHIP 159 



The important part played by women in the Dionysian 

 sex-festival is also to be borne in mind. As in Teutonic 

 lands, so in Greece and Eome we can trace back below 

 a much more elaborate civilisation the simple habits 

 of primitive life, with their evidences of a totally 

 different status for women and a widely diverse sexual 

 system. 



The notion that a gathering is at once a tribal 

 council, a choral festival, and a military unit is well illus- 

 trated by the O.H.G. glosses gasamani for congregatio, 

 gesemine for chorus, kesemene for concilium, gesemene 

 for coetus, phalanx, and liutgasameni for folk-gathering. 

 To these may be added a mysterious brutsamana used 

 by Notker for ecclesia. But what was a brutsamana in 

 pre-Christian times ? We seem carried back once more 

 to the choruses of maidens singing the hileih in the early 

 Christian churches. 



Another word which may be just noted is fare, to 

 go or travel, but this quite early has the meaning of 

 fare, to feed. Thus A.S. gefer, gefere is glossed by 

 consortium, a faring together, gefera by socius, comes, 

 sodalis, contubernalis, i.e. a comrade not only on the 

 way, but at table and in the home. Geferraeden, liter- 

 ally a talking together of the gefere, comes to mean 

 household (domus,familias), the intercourse of comrades 

 (societas, familiaritas), the corporate group of the 

 markgenossenschaft, but also sex-intimacy, marriage 

 as we find in contubernium. The root runs indeed 



heathen festival of the Spurcalia, which caused February to be called sporkel- 

 maand ? Was it from the Aryan root spherag, swell, burst, giving spJwragos, 

 shoots, buds, but with the sense also of any young life as in German Schossling 

 for Schooskind ? 



