"After creation, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and other near
relatives married promiscuously among one another, until the evil
effects of such connections showed themselves clearly. A conference of
leaders was held, and it was considered in what way this could be
avoided. The outcome of the conference was a request to the Muramura
(Great Spirit); and he ordered in his answer that the tribe be divided
into several branches, and that, in order to distinguish them, they be
called by different names, after animate or inanimate objects. For
instance: after the dingo, the mouse, the emu, the rain, the
iguana-lizard, etc. The members of one and the same group could not
marry another. The son of a Dingo could not, for instance, marry the
daughter of a Dingo; each of the two could, however, enter into
connections with the Mouse, the Emu, the Rat, or any other family."
This tradition is more sensible and natural, by a good deal, than the
Christian tradition, taught by the Bible. It shows plainly the rise of
the consanguine groups. Moreover, Paul Lafargue, makes in the "Neue
Zeit" the sagacious, and, we think, felicitous point, that names, such
as Adam and Eve, are not names of individual persons, but the names of
gentes, in which, at the time, the Jews were joined. Lafargue solves by
his argument a series of otherwise obscure and contradictory passages in
the first Book of Moses. Again, M. Beer calls attention, likewise in the
"Neue Zeit," that, to this day, it is a conjugal custom among Jews that
the bride and the bridegroom's mother _may not carry the same name_,
otherwise--thus runs this belief--a misfortune will befall the family:
sickness and death will pursue them. In our opinion, this is a further
proof for the correctness of Lafargue's theory. The gentile organization
forbids marriage between persons that descend from the same gens stock.
Such a common descent must be considered to exist, according to gentile
principles, between the bride, that carries the name of "Eve," and the
bridegroom's mother of the same name. Modern Jews, of course, have no
longer the remotest suspicion of the real connection between their
prejudice and their old gentile constitution, which forbade such
marriages of relatives. The old gentile order had for its object to
avoid the degenerating consequences of in-breeding. Although this
gentile constitution has for thousands of years been destroyed among the
Jews, tradition, as we see, has continued to live in superstition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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