198 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap. 



other forms of incest the more common (though, 

 it should be said, incest of any form is very in- 

 frequent) are those involving father and daughter, 

 brother and sister, and brother and half-sister. 



The punishment of the incestuous couple does 

 not suffice to ward off the danger brought by them 

 upon the community. The household must be 

 purified with the blood of pigs and fowls; the 

 animals used are the property of the offenders or 

 of their family ; and in this way a fine is imposed. 



When any calamity threatens or falls upon a 

 house, especially a great rising of the river which 

 threatens to sweep away the house or the tombs of 

 the household, the Kayans are led to suspect that 

 incestuous intercourse in their own or in neighbour- 

 ing houses has taken place ; and they look round for 

 evidences of it, and sometimes detect a case which 

 otherwise would have remained hidden. It seems 

 probable that there is some intimate relation be- 

 tween this belief and the second of the two modes 

 of punishment described above ; but we have no 

 direct evidence of such connection.^ 



daughters, and against intercourse between the young males admitted to 

 membership of the group and the wives of the patriarch, would be the essential 

 conditions of advance of social organisation. The enforcement of these 

 penalties would engender a traditional sentiment against such unions, and these 

 would be the unions primitively regarded as incestuous. The persistence of the 

 tendency of the patriarch's jealousy to drive his sons out of the family group as 

 they attained puberty would render the extension of this sentiment to brother- 

 and-sister unions easy and almost inevitable. For the young male admitted to 

 the group would be one who came with a price in his hand to offer in return 

 for the bride he sought. Such a price could only be exacted by the patriarch 

 on the condition that he maintained an absolute prohibition on sexual relations 

 between his offspring so long as the young sons remained under his roof. 



It is not impossible that a trace of the primitive state of society imagined by 

 Messrs. Atkinson and Lang survives in the fact that a Kayan chief may, if he 

 is so inclined, temporarily possess himself of the wife of any of his men with- 

 out raising the strong resentment and incurring the penalties which would 

 attend adultery on the part of any other man of the house ; but the law against 

 incest with his daughters, whether natural or adopted, would be enforced 

 against him by the co-operation of the chiefs of neighbouring houses and 

 villages. 



1 A limestone cliff whose foot is washed by the Baram river and which 

 contains a number of caves (known as Batu Gading, or the ivory rock) is said by 

 a Kayan legend to have been formed by a Kayan house being turned into stone 

 owing to incestuous conduct within it. 



