GENERAL WORDS FOR SEX AND KINSHIP 165 



endogamy was once the custom of these communistic 

 kindred households. A great feature of a bratsvo, as of 

 the <t>parpla, is the kin-feast, conducted by the alderman of 

 the group household. It is held in honour of the kin- 

 saint or patron, who has no doubt usurped the place of 

 some heathen deity. The revelry ends with choruses 

 and dances of youths and maidens, certain of these 

 dances being of the type otherwise only performed at 

 weddings. 1 



Thus, whether we consider the zupa as philologically 

 related or not to the sibja, we find among the Southern 

 Slavs precisely the same communistic kin -households 

 with their fenced place, their judicial arrangements, 

 common land, and kin-festivals as we have found among 

 Germans and Greeks. It is clear that we are dealing 

 with a type of Aryan civilisation, not with something 

 peculiarly German ; and what is more a type funda- 

 mentally inconsistent with the patriarchal system. 



(10) Another general word for sex-relationship is 

 freien, with the noun freite, one of the earliest 

 Teutonic words for sexual freedom. It is noteworthy 

 that freien now stands for the wooing or courtship 

 which precedes marriage, and very generally but by no 

 means universally all sex-relationship. Precisely in the 

 period of wooing, however, the woman, even under the 

 patriarchal system, has more of equality and comrade- 

 ship than at any later period. The period of courtship 

 forms, I believe, a faint reflex of the relation of the 

 sexes in the mother-age. This period is essentially a 



1 For the above and many other particulars of the zupa and bratsvo see 

 Krauss, Sitte u. Branch der Sildslaven, Vienna, 1885. 



