THE ARYAN HOUSEHOLD.*
SOCIOLOGY, in its historical and arelneological aspect, has re- cently been undergoing changes analogous to those which, at .an earlier date, took place in the investigation of physical science. Vague and general conjecture as to what was likely to have taken place in the gradual formation and development of human society has been succeeded by careful collection of historical facts and traditions, and by the study of those phew:). - mena of life among ruder nations which bear the marks of being ." survivals " from Archaic times. Blackstone, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and even so modern a writer as Austin, all belonged more or less to the Conjectural school ; while Mr. Tylor, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Sir J. Lubbock, and above all, Sir H. S. Maine, have contributed largely to the sounder method of in- quiry; while Max Muller, from his own points of view, has given invaluable aid ; and Mr. J: F. M`Lennan, in his very original books, has dug into an almost new stratum, which had been, perhaps, too much neglected by others.
The work now before us, written by a learned lawyer con- nected with the Colonial University of Melbourne, is, at least in form, one of the purest examples of the inductive process, with the least possible admixture of reasoning from the principles, or supposed principles, of human nature, that we have met with. Possibly its inductive method is oven too severe, and errs iu an opposite direction from that in which the older speculators went so far astray. Mr. Hearn limits his inquiry to the so- called Aryan races, that great family of mankind which, start- ing from the banks of the Oxus and Iaxartes, spread south- wards over India and to the north-west over Europe, whence in modern times it has peopled America and Australia, compre- hending, with the sole exception of the Jews and some others of the Semitic tribes, all those branches of the human race which have shown a capability of indefinite pro- gress, and of attaining the higher forms of civilisation. In general concord with the views of Sir H. S. Maine, he finds mo evidence that the Aryan races ever passed through the state of savagery, or even through that stage of development in which marriage was unknown, and relationship through the * The Aryan llovsehold: its Structure and Devetopmeet. An Introduction to Comparailve Jurisprudence. By William Edmund mourn, LL.D., Dean of the Faculty of Law In the University of Melbourne. Loud : Longman, Green, and Co. 1870.
father impossible of ascertainment. He finds among our ancestors nothing prior to the existence of the " Household," a corporation with its Paterfamilias ruling with despotic sway his descendants, his women, and in some cases such slaves or other subordinates as might have been admitted to the family group. Agnatic relation, in this state of things, was the only kinship which could be recognised; all were in mann of the House Father, who was the guardian of the family sacra, and who alone could conduct the worship, sacrificial and otherwise, of the domestic hearth, offered to the spirit of their chief ancestor • or Eponym, who, when duly propitiated, was the tutelary demon of the Household, All this Mr. Hearn traces with great elaboration in the records of ancient Greece, in the Roman law, in Scandinavian, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Keltic ideas and customs, in the rules laid down by the mythological lawgiver Menu, and in the institution of existing Indian communities. The develop- meat of the Clan, and the subsequent erection of the State on its rums, are investigated with much learning, much power of generalisation, and with admirably clear and systematic method.
A great part of this has been, of course, written by others, and is familiar to all who have studied the subject in its modern development ; but there are phases of the question on which our author enlarges more fully, and to which he attaches a greater importance than they have appeared to others to merit. With the exception, we believe, of K. do Coulanges, nobody has dealt so fully with the religious aspect of the archaic household as our present author. It is impossible to doubt that the " House Spirit " played a most remarkable part in the history and constitution of the ancient family, and was for ages the chain which bound together the domestic group, and even the larger clan, and formed the pledge and security of its permanence. The Paterfamilias was not only the progenitor, real or imputed, of the family, but was emphatically its priest, and the medium of communication between it and the unseen Powers. The Lae firmiliaris who hovered over the household, whose altar was the hearth, where was supposed to be his chief abode, was probably a creation of the religious instinct prior in time to those impersonations of the powers of Nature which also played so large a part iu the polytheistic imagination. With him, the communion was more intimate in proportion as his sphere was more limited, and to him was offered a portion of every family meal, to preserve his interest in that household whose members were his children or descendants. The sacrifice was his food—or, at least, he consumed the sweet - smelling savour which was supposed to form . the spiritual or more ethereal element of it—an idea common to almost every variety of sacrifice, in all countries and all ages. There is something almost pathetic in the earnest- ness and thoroughness of belief with which the archaic mind, stretching out "lame hands of faith" into darkness in search of something to worship, caught almost universally at the thought of the paternal care of the spirits of dead ancestors. The fatherhood of the one God, the highest and most ennobling idea of the religion of civilised man, was surely the one truth lying at the root of the very superstition which, from its domestic form, necessarily produced the most multitudinous Pantheon which polytheism has ever known. Curious, too, are the survivals of the hearth-god in modern communities, loug after the time when, at the dawn of a purer and more comprehensive faith, Milton says,—
" And on the holy hearth,
The hors and Lemures moaned with midnight plaint."
The Brownie, the Kobold, and the Robin-Goodfellow,--the " Lubber Fiend," who does the work of the family in the night, " to earn his cream-bowl duly set," is the degenerate descendent of the ancient Lar. Not an old Keltic family in the Highlands of Scotland or in Ireland but has its haunting ancestral spirit to this day, and the very word " Boduch "—the common appella- tion of such beings--is the same which signifies the old man, or head of the family ; while in Lowland Scotch, borrowed from their Keltic neighbours, it appears in the half-compassionate, half-contemptuous expression, " poor body," applied to a poor old beggar, or other object of pity. The Pongee have almost invariably been the divinities who have longest resisted the inroad of a larger faith. Even Buddhism was compelled to recognise them in the East, and. the early Christians of Rome long con- tinued to inscribe on the tombs of their relatives the significant letters " DX." (Dias Manibus.) The patron saint, the guar- dian of the house, the street, or the bridge, in Southern Europe, is a survival, in somewhat altered shape, of the same belief. Who knows how far the profound tendency of the mind to -attach itself to superhuman powers of limited or local agency, and antagonistic to other similar powers, presiding over other regions or peoples, still plays an absolutely unconscious part in the virulence of religious war, and the jealousy of rival sects ? Obstinately persistent as this instinct has undoubtedly proved itself to be, it will hardly do to refer the very existence of the Archaic family organisation to its influence. It is difficult to imagine that so clear-headed a writer as Mr. Hearn intends to convey this meaning ; but iu innumerable passages, lie i
e speaks of the household as if it would never have come into play at all, but for this religious element. The latter, no doubt, aided enormously in giving stability to the former, and deeply modified its customs, especially in regard to the law of succession and inheritance, and the theories and duties con- nected with posterity, as our author has abundantly shown ; but it is a mere truism to say that the idea of a house spirit necessarily presupposes the existence of the household itself. 'The latter must be prior to the former, both logically and chronologically, and whatever may have been the condition in reference to the intercourse of the sexes and the counting of kin in what may be called the brute-stage of humanity (assum- ing that the Aryan race ever passed through such a stage), there is no reason to suppose that the paternal and family affections and instincts were not at least coeval with, and in- deed preliminary, in their development, to that of the religious organisation in question. Mr. Hearn must see this as clearly as we do, but he has certainly not said so, and his language, in passages too numerous for quotation, has certainly conveyed an opposite impression. The enormous influence of house-worship is, in fact, his pet theme, and we are certainly indebted to him for working it out to its utmost limits, and he has successfully applied it to many branches of his subject, in regard to which most of his predecessors have undervalued its importance. In his conclusion that the Aryan race cannot be shown to have existed in any more rude condition than that which the existence of the Household and House Father implies, we can- not avoid thinking that he has done scant justice to the re- searches of Mr. M'Lennan. Surely we are not mistaken, in holding that that writer has succeeded in tracing the signs of previously existing uterine kinship and polyandry in races usually considered Aryan. The disputes about exogamy are more difficult, and at the same time somewhat less important in their general bearing.
The peculiarities to which we have .alluded do not, however, seriously affect the value of Mr. Ilearn's inquiries into the evidence of the wonderful agency exercised down to very ad- vanced periods by the Archaic institution of the Household. Even.the students of Sir H. Maine's works will find much that is very instructive and suggestive in this volume, in addition to, and sometimes at variance• with, the views of that remarkable author. We would specially recommend the careful considera- tion of the chapter on " Non-Genealogic Clans,"—those "caves o£ Adullam " which were the refuge of adventurers and outcasts . —which, without the bond of physical relationship, yet proved, by their adoption of a fictitious family tie and its conditions, how deeply rooted the idea of the household and clan organisation was in the minds of those times ; the chapter entitled, " Geatis
buia no8ine," and, above all, the discussion on the jut; public/n and jua privatum, and on the "Rise of Civil Jurisdiction." All who are interested in the study of the development of juris- prudence will find in these chapters much light thrown not merely on subjects of antiquarian curiosity, but on questions of modern practical importance. Legislation, it is almost unneces- sary to remark, cannot proceed on safe ground, nor can the interpretation of legal principles be really profound, without looking to the historical side of every institution, enactment, and custom. Social organisms, as well as the phenomena of physical life, have their laws of evolution and development, which neither the jurisconsult nor the legislator can overlook -with impunity.
Mr. Hearn's book is not well suited for quotation, but as a specimen of his style and mode of dealing with his subject, wo May give a passage from i
his concluding chapter on "The Decadence of the Clan," which is, perhaps, of a more popular and less technical nature than the greater part of the work. After discussing the action of "the State" in disintegrating gentile forms, the unit of the former being the individual and the unit of the latter the household or the tribe, and illus- trating the, process mainly from Roman and British history, he writes thus of the disintegrating influence of Christianity. After mentioning Milton's allusion, in the " Hymn to the Nativity," to the lamentation of the Lares on their approaching banishment,— "Good cause, indeed, had the Lar to mon» ; and yet his importance in the new warfare, obscure as ho seemed, was far beyond that of the more pretentious deities of whom the poet sings. Ever since that memorable night, there has been between the Lar and the Church a war without parley and without truce. In the East, the Ler still obstinately maintains his ground. In the West, he has been remorse. lessly hunted down. I need not repeat the evidence which, in an earlier chapter, 1 have offered, to show the war of extermination which the Church carried on against the household worship, and its general success. But this worship was the foundation of Archaic society ; and when the old beliefs wore thus destroyed, the social superstructure could no longer stand. Nor was this all. The pre- cepts on which the Church daily insisted were antagonistic to the most cherished principles of the clan. The God of the Christians was no mere Gentile deity, who confined his favour to his own people. The dream of the Hellenic poet had assumed a definite shape, and the description of the Pantheistic Zees was applied in a souse which its author would hardly have regarded as possible. All men were alleged to be of one blood, for wo are all his offspring.' So long as this view was confined to mere theory, little regard was paid to it. But it was a hard thing for a Eupatrid to sympathise with a deity who was no respecter of persons, and in whose eyes a slave might be of equal or greater worth than a man who, like Hekataeos, reckoned sixteen ancestors, and the seventeenth was a god. To the clansman, blood-revenge was the most imperative of duties ; and the resentment of injuries was a sacred obligation. How, then, could he forgive his enemies and pray for those that despitefully used him P Further, the whole theory and practice of Christianity implied the recognition of the individual man, and the value of a single human soul. It involved rights and duties which could not bo
subordinated to the commands of the House Father In those eases where the Berrien Law had disintegrated the archaic society, Christianity supplied a pressing want. The State had taken the place of the clan. But in the State was no place for women, or for children, or for slaves. From these classes the protection of the Lar was practically withdrawn, and the protection of the State was not yet granted to them. It was natural, therefore, that they should welcome a religion which gave to them not only protection, but a social position and consideration beyond anything to which they could otherwise aspire."
This book deserves a much longer notice than our limits admit. It is satisfactory to find so thoughtful and philosophical a treatise written by one who is now resident in a distant colony, where we of the old country are apt to imagine that nothing flourishes which has not an absolutely direct bearing on what are called, in the lower sense of the term, "the practical interests of life."
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