360 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



Hivsu : Tupo ana's remark, that such couples are expected to stay 

 married forever, since they were headstrong enough to insist upon 

 contracting an incestuous marriage, also implies that the permanency 

 of such marriages is, for all practical purposes, viewed by the Mohave 

 as a kind of penalty. This aspect of the very rudimentary Mohave 

 marriage rite for incestuous couples probably sheds some light also 

 upon the origins of marriage rites and upon the obligations which the 

 married state carries with it everywhere.^* Further aspects of 

 this finding can best be discussed in connection with the mythical 

 precedent for incestuous marriages. 



The mythical precedent for incest, and especially for incestuous 

 marriages, is the Tmna:np'a Utau:t myth (Kroeber, 1925 a, and 

 M.S., n.d.; Devereux, 1939 a). Briefly stated, the prototypal incest 

 was not a casual affair, but a formal marriage. This point is of great 

 importance since, so far as can be ascertained, no one has ever pointed 

 out that all truly basic incest myths almost invariably pertain to in- 

 cestuous marriages, rather than to casual incestuous affairs. 



For the purposes of the present discussion it suffices to present this 

 myth in the form of a synopsis. 



After Matavilye's death, the people, among whom were Tuma : np'a and his 

 sister Kuakwicavepon, left the death house. At a certain place, now called 

 St. George, this pair turned back and once more passed Matavilye's death house. 

 Then, wandering around, they entered Chemehuevi Valley and reached the 

 southern edge of a camp inhabited by various tribes. There the brother and 

 sister danced and sang all night the Tuma : np'a song cycle." That night 

 the girl left her brother and "married" a young man, but at daybreak Tuma : np'a 

 went to her house and took her away from her husband, because he did not 

 favor this marriage. Having persuaded his sister to follow him, Tuma : np'a 

 once more proceeded southward with her. After they had covered some four or 

 five miles, Tuma : np'ji somehow acquired certain magical powers, through the 

 fact that the sun shone on him."" This magic enabled the brother and sister 

 to travel underground. Finally, after emerging from the ground at Hakutcip 



" The preceding considerations are based solely on sociocultural facts and upon 

 anthropological reasoning. Exactly the same conclusions could have been reached also 

 through psychoanalytic reasoning, in terms of Freud's views on the origins of marriage 

 and the incest tal)0(). Indeed, even though the "cyclopean family" (Freud, 1952) is 

 certainly a fiction, which condenses into a single event a development lasting many mil- 

 lennia, Freud's critics have perhaps been overly hasty in refusing to see sometliing which 

 Freud himself did without realizing that he was doing it: The single "critical occurrence" 

 In the "cyclopean family" postulated by Freud can be quite effectively thought of as a 

 scientifically productive "as if" conceptual device, comparable to the theoretical physicist's 

 nonexistent "frictlonless surfaces," "unl)endable levers," "perfectly elastic bodies" and the 

 like. This is shown, inter alia, by the existence of a Fan myth (Trllles, 1912) which 

 Is, almost word for word, identical with Freud's convenient fiction of the cyclopean family 

 and with his theory of the origin of the incest taboo. One might almost say that in 

 this instance, in seeming to perpetrate a scientific monstrosity, Freud — with the unerring 

 instinct of genius — icrought better than he himself kneio. In advancing a theory which 

 he believed to be factually correct, he actually rose to great heights of metliodological 

 imaginativeness, and formulated a scientific "fiction" coiniiarablc in legitimacy and 

 usefulness to the fictions used by theoretical physicists, day after day. 



" Despite this detail, the cycle in question is not a dancing song in Mohave culture. 



"" The activation of a magical object by the rays of the sun is also mentioned by 

 McNIchols (1944). 



