Chapter XV · THE COUVADE AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF THE BLOOD-TIE—CONCLUSION OF THE INQUIRY INTO THE THEORY OF THE LIFE-TOKEN.

In the last three chapters we have discussed some savage customs founded on the belief that the members of a kin are parts of an entire body and connected with one another by an indissoluble tie, so long as they remain members of that body and are not cut off by formal expulsion or renunciation, either with or without union to another similar body. Many other practices are derived from the same notion. I select a few of them for notice in the present chapter.

The Couvade as generally explained is the custom which requires the father of a child, immediately after its birth, to lie-in as if he were a woman in childbed, while his wife, who has actually given birth to the babe, goes about her ordinary work, and of course waits upon her husband in his feigned sickness. But this definition is inadequate and misleading. In order to attain a true conception of the custom it is not enough to limit our observation to a small number of cases and in those cases to regard only the most prominent phenomena, because they strike us as the most ridiculous. We must clear our minds of the notion that the father takes the mother’s place, in the sense, at all events, that he is made to undergo the treatment she is entitled to, and at her expense. Whether from living a more active and open-air life than her more civilised sisters, or from physical causes more deeply seated, the ease with which a savage woman gives birth is much more like that of a wild beast. She will often deliver herself without aid; and, subject to the ceremonial rules of the tribe concerning uncleanness, in a very little time she is ready to return to her usual occupations. Simulation of her sufferings, not to say disregard of them, by the husband is therefore in most cases out of the question.

If this be so, the Carib tortures, it is evident, spring from the same root as other observances comprehended under the general name of the Couvade. Both in the Carib and Minahassee forms we find the tendency to emphasise the birth of the first child, or perhaps I should rather say, to relax the requirements in the case of after-born children. The tendency is not to be looked upon as a recognition of heirship, but as one arising naturally in the course of ceremonial decay. The first child is the most important; for it is a pledge of the continuance of the family or kindred, and brings very often an accession of honour, or at least of consideration, to its parents. Among peoples where conjugal fidelity is imperfectly developed, moreover, it is the one of whose parentage the father is best assured, and consequently the one on whose health and strength his conduct will be likely, if not certain, to have influence. Thus the motives for the care of the offspring, and therefore for the special observance of all precautions, concentrate upon the first child; and if the custom be found irksome, or for any other reason be liable to loosen its hold, it will generally continue to be fully observed in respect of the first child, long after it has begun to fall into neglect on subsequent births.

The racial and geographical distribution of the practice is a more difficult question than it might at first sight appear, considering the number of authorities who have examined it. If we limit not the definition of the Couvade to the cases where the father actually lies down, but extend it, as it seems proper to do, to all those where he has before as well as after the birth to observe various taboos, in which the mother is often included—then we may find either the custom itself or relics of it over the greater part of the world. America, inhabited by a homogeneous race, displays it everywhere, even among the Eskimos of Greenland, save apparently in Tierra del Fuego. On the eastern continent Mr. Ling Roth puts the matter somewhat strongly when he says that it “is only met with in isolated and widely separated localities.” In Australia it is unknown; nor is there any record of it among the extinct Tasmanians. Summing up the facts, the same writer says: “The custom does not appear to exist or to have existed among those people to whom the term ‘most degraded’ is erroneously applied, people which were better described as savages living in the lowest known forms of culture, such as the Australians, Tasmanians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Veddahs, Sakeys, Aetas, and Fuegians. Neither does the custom exist among the so-called civilised portion of mankind. In other words, Couvade appears at first sight to be limited to peoples who hold an intermediate position between those in the highest and those in [the] lowest states of culture. As such it may be said to represent an intermediate or transition state of mental development.”

The custom of Adoption seems to have arisen with the appearance of the true family. The mode of admission into a totem-kin is by the blood-covenant, and the neophyte becomes a blood-brother. But when the smaller circle of the family emerges, containing only the parents and their descendants either by monogamic or polygynic marriage, adoption by the head of the family of a child from without is found a convenient means of recruiting its numbers. For a long time adoption into the family goes on side by side with admission by blood-covenant into the kin. The object of both rites, though similar, is not identical, inasmuch as the bodies into which admission is obtained are not the same. The blood-covenant, therefore, is not ousted by adoption, and only tends to disappear with the abandonment of the clan-organisation. In fact, in the custom of Adoptive Brotherhood it has continued among the Slavs to the present day. Adoption seems to attain its greatest strength where what we may term legal kinship is reckoned only on one side, whether through the father only or the mother only. When legal kinship comes to coincide with natural kinship the circle of the kin widens, and the organisation of society changes, so as to render less needful the strengthening of the family by adding artificially to its numbers; testamentary rights come into existence; the feeling of natural kinship dominates the legal idea; and kinship by adoption ultimately vanishes. For this reason Adoption is unknown to the English law, and the same may probably be said of other modern nations, notwithstanding their ancestors may have practised it, even where their law is an ancient system, adapted from time to time to the development of national requirements, and not based upon a revolutionary subversion of older institutions.

Passing, with this hasty sketch of Adoption, away from the inner circle of family relationships, let us look at one or two aspects of the wider clan-life, illustrating the strength of the blood-tie.

The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. But to do so would be to repeat the same evidence, frequently in the same words, over and over again. I shall, therefore, give only a few of the more striking instances.

We may now sum up the results of our inquiry into the theory of the Life-token. The length of the investigation is justified by the importance of the subject in the long and wonderful history of civilisation. I do not pretend here to give a complete account of savage philosophy. In spite of the investigations of anthropologists during the last thirty years, we are as yet far from being in a position to form a satisfactory synthesis—a synthesis which will reckon with the many-sided activity of the human mind, even in the lower stages of its development, and will estimate at its due value every influence, material as well as intellectual, which, entering in early times into the stream of culture, deflected its current or added to its volume, until it at last attained that irresistible force whose direction we know though its issue remains dark and uncertain. My own object is much humbler. And if I have succeeded in laying with any measure of clearness before the reader the sacramental conception of life underlying the incident of the Life-token, I must not be supposed to depreciate as factors in savage culture other conceptions with which I am not immediately concerned. I am quite aware, too, that much that I have put forward, in so far as I have put forward anything new, must be considered as yet only tentative and conjectural. Tradition, conservative as it is, is in its nature shifting and liable to endless combinations. It is, therefore, compounded of elements not merely various, but often contradictory. This renders the task of disentangling peculiarly difficult, needing patience that cannot be discouraged, and an insight that long familiarity with the ideas of the uncivilised will not always give.

Starting from his personal consciousness, the savage attributes the like consciousness to everything he sees or feels around him. And holding that outward form is by no means of the essence of existence or of individuality, he looks upon transformation as an ordinary incident, happening to all men at death, happening to many men and other creatures whensoever they will. From the capacity of transformation to the capacity of division the step is not a long one. To be transformed into a pomegranate or a heap of grain is to have one’s life equally diffused through a thousand seeds, each of which is endowed with the powers and possibilities of the whole. Scattered, they may re-unite; and if all but one be destroyed, from that one a new whole can be reproduced, or some other shape may be assumed wherein will reside, undiminished and unobscured, all the consciousness and all the power of the original. But what was regarded as true of one shape was regarded as true of another. It was deemed to be practicable so to sever one’s own personality as to secrete and safeguard one’s life. This severed portion we call—we have no better word—the External Soul. So long as the External Soul was unharmed the man could not be slain. And conversely, its condition would be an index of his. This perhaps is an inconsistency; but logical consistency is not always important to savages. It is evident that if the life be bound up with an object outside the man, the two will decay and die together. The Life-token, therefore, or the External Soul, must be carefully tended and watched, so as to preserve it and promote its growth and prosperity, and through it the growth and prosperity of the person to whom it belongs, and of whom it is a part. Any severed fragment of the substance of a man then assumes importance. Though severed, it is, notwithstanding, inseparably connected with him; and injury inflicted upon it would be felt by him. On the other hand, care bestowed upon it and the promotion of its well-being would redound to his advantage. Hence one of the methods of witchcraft was to injure the severed portion of his substance, and one of the methods of defence, both against witchcraft and more direct attack, was to unite the severed portion with some divinity. But the conception of life which regarded it as severable could not be confined to actual portions of the substance. Whatever was closely bound up with a man’s personality would be looked upon as part of himself. His clothing and weapons, constantly associated with him, would attract a measure of the consideration due to himself, would be deemed fragments of his identity, would be filled with his life. And as his property increased with civilisation it would all be included in the same manner, until at last his mere appointment, the exercise of that will and of that power which had been instrumental in acquiring and guarding his property, became sufficient to create any object his External Soul or Life-token.

Whether observation of the natural phenomenon of birth—the separation of a child from its mother’s body—contributed to the evolution of this train of superstition we do not know. We know, however, that, parallel with the mode of thought which thus represented the personality as divisible, and, so far as we can ascertain, on the same plane of culture with it, a kindred descended in fact or by reputation from a single mother, was held to be, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body. The kinsmen were one flesh, members one of another, by virtue of their common parent. That parent was, in the lowest stage of civilisation in which we can trace it, generally held to be a brute, a tree or some other vegetable, occasionally one of the heavenly bodies, or even a rock. No difficulty would be felt in this by a people who believed in the doctrine of Transformation. The object so regarded as parent was the name and emblem of the kin. It was sacred; and where, as it usually was, it was fit for food, it was never eaten, save on certain solemn occasions when the kinsmen met to signify and renew their union by partaking of a sacramental meal. When the object was not eatable, it was represented on these occasions by another which could be eaten. As civilisation advanced, the rites of totemism gave place to, or grew into, the worship of anthropomorphic gods, and the sacred ancestral object, or totem as it is called, sank into a symbol, or attendant, or into a special property of the god who had superseded it.

The last part of our inquiry has not been useless to our more immediate subject. It has not only shown us how consonant to other human institutions and human thoughts is the belief in the Life-token and the divisibility of the personality; but it has also furnished us with the reason why the life-token was left behind when the hero started on his adventures, why his brothers followed him, and why in many cases the slaughtered dragon found an avenger. The hero and his brothers were one body. The Medusa-witch, in striking him, struck them; and their plain duty was revenge. So likewise when the hero slew the dragon, the surviving kin of the dragon, whether mother or brother, must in return compass the hero’s death. Moreover, we may see in the same conception of life the reason why the mere appointment by a kinsman is sufficient to create a life-token for the hero. If the kinsman be of one body with the hero, separate yet united, his appointment would be equivalent to that of the hero himself. He could therefore at any time divine with accuracy as to the condition of his absent relative.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to insist on the universality of the chain of beliefs discussed in the present volume. I have tried to put before the reader instances from every quarter of the globe; and though of course I have not literally proved the beliefs to be universal, I think I have shown a distribution so wide and general as to induce a very strong presumption of their existence among tribes that have passed without mention, and even among tribes of whose culture and modes of thought we are as yet ignorant. A conception of life which we know to be held from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the islands of the Southern Seas we may reasonably believe to be inseparable from human thought, at least until it has reached the highest levels of culture; and we may therefore predicate it with every probability not merely of living races whose traditions have yet to be explored, but also of the prehistoric dead whose barrows, dumb on this question, often betray only that other belief to which human nature clings everywhere so pathetically—the belief in the life after death. That belief, we may be sure, was not held alone. As we find it in man to-day, so doubtless it was to be found ages ago: only one of a cycle of beliefs which we may hope soon to be able to reconstruct, as the geologist builds again a primæval monster from a single bone.

[End of vol. II]