To all these characteristic features of the matriarchate we may add this very important one, that, according to the old Russian law, the tie which unites a man to his sister and the children she has brought into the world, was considered to be closer than that which unites two brothers or the uncle and his nephew. In a society organised on the principle of agnatism, the son of a sister has no reason to interfere in the pursuit of the murderer of his uncle. The brother belongs altogether to another clan, and the duty of vengeance falls exclusively on the persons of that clan. But such is by no means the point of view of the old Russian law, recognising, as it does, the right of the sister's son to avenge the death of his uncle.
"In case a man shall he killed by a man," decrees the first article of the Pravda of Yaroslav (the lex barborum of the Russians), "vengeance may be taken by a son, in case his father has been killed; by the father, when the son falls a victim; by the brother's son and by the son of a sister." These last words are omitted in the later versions of the Pravda, a fact which shows the increase of agnatic organisation, but they are found in the version generally recognised as the most ancient.
This close tie between brother and sister, between the uncle and the sister's children, still exists among the Southern Slavs.
Professor Bogisic. and after him Mr Krauss, have illustrated this fact by the epic songs of the Servian people. They speak of the custom generally in use among the Southern Slavs of securing from a person truthfulness in is statements by the invocation of the name of the sister. They mention, too, that peculiar relation of artificial brotherhood and sisterhood, into which young men and young women belonging to different kindreds frequently enter, in order to secure to the weaker sex protection and help.
I hardly need insist on the importance which all these facts have with regard to the theory of an early matiarchate among the Slavs, the more so because this has already been done in England by Mr McLennan, in his well-known study on the Patriarchal theory, and in Germany by Bachofen in one of his Antiquarian Letters. (7*) But I shall complete the information which these scholars have given by citing certain peculiar customs still in use among Russian peasants.
Whilst the father is considered to be the proper person to dispose of the hand of the bride, the brother, according to the wedding ritual, appears as the chief protector of her virginity.
In more than one province of Russia the brother plays an important part in that potion of the nuptial ceremony which may be called by the Latin name of in domus deductio. As soon as the bridegroom has made his appearance in the court-yard of the family to which his bride belongs, the brother, in accordance with an old custom, takes his seat next the bride with a naked sword, or at least a stick, in his hand. The bridegroom, or the groomsman, asking to be allowed to take his seat, receives as answer, that the brother is there to keep ward over his sister, and that he will not consent to leave his seat unless he be paid for it. "Dear brother, don't give me away for nothing. Ask a hundred roubles for me, for the veil which covers my head a thousand roubles. Ask for my beauty -- God alone knows how much."Such is the tenor of the song composed for the occasion. "The brother, a true Tartar," we read in the text of another nuptial song, "has sold his sister for a thaler, and her fair tresses for fifty copecks."In Little Russia the drawn sword which the brother holds in his hand on the occasion is ornamented with the red berries of the guelderrose, red being the emblem of maidenhood among Slavonic peoples. Other emblems are the binding of the bride's tresses, and the veil which covers her head. The bridegroom is not allowed to remove the veil, nor to unbind the tresses of his future wife, unless he consents to pay a small sum of money to her bother.
Hitherto we have considered the different aspects of the earliest period in the evolution of the family -- that which is known by the term of the matriarchate. The various features which characterised the lowest state of the relations between the sexes did not vanish all at once. The incestuous relations between persons of the same blood seem to have been the first to disappear. No further mention of these occurs in Nestor's description of the Eastern tribes -- the Radimich, Viatich, and Sever. Thog they practise communal marriage so far that fathers and sons have wives in common, nevertheless fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, dare no longer cohabit with each other, and if licence still occurs at some annual festivities, it is kept under some check.
