SPECIAL WORDS FOR SEX AND RELATIONSHIP 235 



quasi eandem januam terentes vel per eandem januam 

 iter habentes." 



This, however incorrect, describes well the position 

 of elvdrepes as cohobentes in the early Aryan days. The 

 group -marriage is again suggested by the gloss crvvwpfyos 

 = consponsus=janitrix. Curiously enough, conspon- 

 salis is used in the sense of commater in the Leges 

 Presbyterorum Nortliumbriensum cited by Ducange, 

 which reminds us again of the link between the god- 

 mother and the co-mothers or co-brides of the group. 

 Grimm connects elvdrepes and janitrices with the root 

 gam, bind, as in ^a^elv, but the origin seems very 

 obscure. It is noteworthy that Polish iatrew, Czech 

 jatrev, Serbian jetrva, akin to Sanskrit ydter, denote 

 cognata, blood-relative, another trace of the kindred 

 group -marriage. It may further be remarked that the 

 children of the consponsae, or co-brides, would be cousins, 

 Low Latin cosinus, Latin sobrinus, consobrinus, San- 

 skrit svesrino, Lithuanian seserynai, a series of terms 

 which again point to a group of sisters as the co-brides. 

 The Greek gives us aeXto* for brothers-in-law whose 

 wives are sisters. The only co-radicate I have come 

 across is Sanskrit sydlas, said to be used for the brother 

 of the wife, again, so far as it goes, evidence of a 

 group of sisters ' married ' to a group of brothers. 1 



1 In the Indian fairy tale of Punchkin (J. Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales) we 

 have just such a group of sisters marrying a group of brothers, with many 

 traces of the old group habits, e.g. " About a year after this Balna had a little 

 son, and his uncles and aunts were so fond of the boy that it was as if he had 

 seven fathers and seven mothers," etc. Another Indian tale, The Son of 

 Seven Queens, is also probably a fossil of the same group-marriage period. In 

 Arabia the "two mothers" means the mother and her sister, and this was 

 probably the origin of the term Ai^rwp for Dionysius, however differently 

 interpreted when its value had become obscure. Precisely the same thing 



