816 



TRIBE 



[b. a. e. 



in games, in ceremonial assemblies, or in 

 any tribal gathering occupied around the 

 actual or assumed fire a place opposite to 

 that held by the other phratry. In the 

 placing of these clan groups the cult of 

 the quarters is merely vestigial, having 

 long ago lost its influence. In the great 

 tribal gambling games between the units 

 of the tribe (for phratry must at all times 

 contend against phratry ) , the eastern side 

 of the "plot" was regarded as insuring 

 success; but at the present day the phra- 

 tries alternate annually in occupying this 

 auspicious quarter, although the phratry 

 occupying this side is not at all times 

 successful. 



This dualism in the organization of the 

 social, religious, and political units, next 

 in importance to that of the tribe itself, 

 is seemingly based on a concept derived 

 from the primitive philosophy of the 

 tribe regarding the procreation, reproduc- 

 tion, and maintenance of life on earth. 

 The clans of a phratry, or association of 

 clans, called one another "brothers," and 

 the clans of the opposite phratry "cous- 

 ins" or "offspring." In the elder period 

 the phratry— the organic unit next to the 

 tribe — was an incest group to the members 

 of it, and consequently marriage was pro- 

 hibited within it, hence the phratry was 

 exogamous. But owing to the many dis- 

 placements of the tribes by the advance 

 of Caucasians this regulation in regard to 

 the phratry has fallen into disuse, so that 

 at the present time the clan alone is the 

 exogamous group, just as the gens is the 

 only exogamous group in those tribes in 

 which gentile organizations prevail and 

 gentile brotherhoods were formerly in 

 vogue. There were, however, never any 

 phratriarchs as suc-h. The chiefs and 

 other officers of the several clans acted as 

 the directors and rulers of the two phra- 

 tries, whose acts, to have tribal force and 

 authority, must have had the approval of 

 both phratries acting conjointly through 

 their recognized representatives. Neither 

 phratry could act for the tribe as a whole. 

 The members of a phratry owed certain 

 duties and obligations to the members of 

 the opposite one; and these obligations 

 were based not only on considerations of 

 consanguinity and affinity but also on 

 esoteric concepts as well. The reason for 

 the last expression will be found to be 

 cosmical and will be emphasized later. 



Selecting the Iroquois tribes as fairly 

 typical of those in which the clan organi- 

 zation had reached its highest develop- 

 ment, it is found that in such a tribe 

 citizenship consisted in being by birth or 

 adoption (q. v.) a member of a clan, and 

 membership by birth in a clan was 

 traced only through the mother and her 

 female ancestors; hence it was solely 

 through the mother that the clan was 



preserved and kept distinct from every 

 other. But although the child acquired 

 his birth-rights only through his mother, 

 singularly enough it was through the 

 father that hia or her kinship was ex- 

 tended beyond his own into that of hia 

 father's clan, which owed to the offspring 

 of its sons certain important obligations, 

 which bound these two clans together 

 not only by marriage but by the stronger 

 tie of a recognized kinship. By this 

 process the clans of the tribe were bound 

 together into a tribal unity. By the or- 

 ganization of the clans of the tribe into 

 two exogamic groups, the possible num- 

 ber of clans between which the said mu- 

 tual rights, privileges, and duties of 

 fatherhood might subsist were in most 

 cases reduced by about half; but this re- 

 duction was not the object of this dual- 

 ism in tribal structure. The wise men 

 of the early Iroquois, having endowed 

 the bodies and elements of their environ- 

 ment and the fictions of their brains 

 with human attributes, regarded these 

 bodies and phenomena as anthropic be- 

 ings, and so they imputed to them even 

 social relations, such as kinship and af- 

 finity, and not the least of these imputed 

 endowments was that of sex — the prin- 

 ciples of fatherhood and motherhood. 

 These beings were therefore apportioned 

 in relative numbers to the two sexes. 

 Even the Upper and the Lower and the 

 Four Quarters were regarded as an- 

 thropic beings. They, too, were male 

 and female; the Sky was male and a 

 father; and the Earth was female and a 

 mother; the Sun, their elder brother, was 

 male, and the Moon, their grandmother, 

 was female. And as this dual principle 

 precedent to procreation was apparently 

 everywhere present, it was deemed the 

 part of wisdom, it would seem, to incor- 

 porate this dual principle by symbolism 

 into the tribal structure, which was of 

 course devised to secure not only welfare 

 to its members living and those yet un- 

 born, but also to effect the perpetuation 

 of the tribe by fostering the begetting of 

 offspring. If then a clan or a gens or a 

 phratry of clans or gentes came to repre- 

 sent symbolically a single sex, it would 

 consequently be regarded as unnatural or 

 abnormal to permit marriage between 

 members of such a symbolic group, and 

 so prohibition of such marriage would 

 naturally follow as a taboo, the breaking 

 of which was sacrilegious. This would 

 in time develop into the inhibition of 

 marriage commonly called exogamy as a 

 protest against unnatural and incestuous 

 sex relations. The union of man and 

 woman in marriage for the perpetuation 

 of the race was but a combination in the 

 concrete of the two great reproductive 

 principles pervading all nature, the male 



