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Updated: June 7, 2025
With a knowledge of the rights, privileges, and obligations of the members of a gens, its capabilities as the unit of a social and governmental system will be more fully understood, as well as the manner in which it entered into the higher organizations of the phratry tribe, and confederacy.
A tradition of the Senecas affirms that the Bear and the Deer were the original gentes, of which the others were subdivisions. It is thus seen that the phratry had a natural foundation in the kinship of the gentes of which it was composed. After their subdivision from increase of numbers there was a natural tendency to their reunion in a higher organization for objects common to them all.
The phratric institution among the Iroquois was in its rudimentary archaic form; but it grew into life by natural and inevitable development, and remained permanent because it met necessary wants Every institution of mankind which attained permanence will be found linked with a perpetual want. With the gens tribe and confederacy in existence the presence of the phratry was substantially assured.
Wherever there are clans, and so long as there is any totemism worthy of the name, this would seem to be the general law. Besides the specific unity, however, provided by the clan, there are wider, and, as it were, more generic unities into which a man is born, in totemic society of the complex type that is found in the actual world of to-day. First, he belongs to a phratry.
Accordingly, permission was granted to Pericles to legitimize, and to inscribe in his own gens and phratry, his natural son by Aspasia, who bore his own name. It was thus that Pericles was reinstated in his post of strategus as well as in his ascendency over the public counsels seemingly about August or September, B.C. 430.
Each in turn, commencing with the senior in years, cast in three shovelfuls, a typical number in their religious system, of which the first had relation to the Great Spirit, the second to the Sun, and the third to Mother Earth When the grave was filled the senior sachem, by a figure of speech, deposited "the horns" of the departed sachem, emblematic of his office, upon the top of the grave over his head, there to remain until his successor was installed In that subsequent ceremony "the horns" were said to be taken from the grave of the deceased ruler and placed upon the head of his successor The social and religious functions of the phratry, and its naturalness in the organic system of ancient society, are rendered apparent by this single usage.
Turkey 10. Crane 11. Chicken 12. It is thus seen that the original Wolf gens divided into four gentes, the Turtle into four, and the Turkey into three. Each new gens took a new name, the original retaining its own, which became by seniority that of the phratry.
It came to be, however, connected with systems of totemism and taboo, and thus to have acquired a certain religious character; and, as being important for the tribal life, it would come under the control of the tribal god when there is such a god. A similar remark may be made in regard to exogamy. Why marriage between members of the same tribe, clan, or phratry should be prohibited is not clear.
Although the name may also refer to a cardinal point, a method of nomenclature followed in some regions of the Southwest, if such were the case in regard to Sikyatki it would be exceptional in Tusayan. The former phratry is not regarded as one of the earliest arrivals in Tusayan, for when its members arrived at Walpi they found living there the Flute, Snake, and Water-house phratries.
But the new clan was closely united to the old by the sense of kinship and by constant intermarriages. This process of splitting and forming new clans had gone on for a long time among the Indians for how many hundreds of years, we have no means of knowing. In this way there had arisen groups of clans, closely united by kinship. Such a group we call a phratry.
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