FAMILY

FAMILY is vitally important to most religious traditions in two closely interconnected ways: Various ritual processes enacted by, to, and for the family help to create and sustain it as well as give it meaning, and it functions as an important symbol of deity. Historically and cross-culturally, family in various forms has (until the late twentieth century in postindustrialized cultures) been so basic to human existence as to be a universal symbol of ultimacy.

Definition

Exactly what constitutes family is not always clear. Some scholars equate family with household, another imprecise construct that variously includes all permanent members such as servants or else excludes unrelated householders. Further confusion results because most anthropologists posit two basic kinds of family: the nuclear family, consisting of mother, father, and unmarried children, and the extended family, typically including mother, father, all unmarried children, and one or more sons with their wives and children. Numerous complicated variations exist, including different polygynous arrangements in which two or more co-wives live under the same roof. A few domestic groupings, such as those of the Nayar of India, whose men never live with their wives, defy all categories. Nonetheless, family, in some variant, is considered universal.

Also confusing is the fact that all married people simultaneously belong to two different families. Family as seat of origination stresses ties of blood, whereas family as affiliation emphasizes bonds of marriage. To keep separate these two different kinds of family, some anthropologists designate the first as "kin" and the second as "family." Kin are those who share common ancestors, as do mother and child (in contrast to mother and father, who do not). Strictly speaking, although family incorporates kin, the reverse is not true because, excepting incestuous marriages, spouses usually are not blood relatives.

Consequently, family is basically a reconciliation of many different opposites: female and male, life and death, ascendants and descendants, kin and affines (relatives by marriage), biology and culture, freedom and servitude, corporation and individuality. The differing ways in which family contains these opposites represent diverse systems of order in which family roles are valued according to accepted local religiocultural belief and custom. Valuation of all members is almost never equal; therefore, family as a whole embodies and symbolizes order of a particular sort—hierarchy.

In its entirety this "natural" order of human relationships, presumed to have evolved out of earlier hominid bands of approximately thirty, has frequently been deified, with members typically reflecting family as experienced in a particular culture. Thus Kwoiam, the warrior hero of Mabuiag, an island off New Guinea, lives with his mother, her brother and sister, and his sister's son in a matrilineal "family" (technically, a kin system) that omits the father. Very different is the Homeric extended patriarchal family of Zeus and Hera, which includes variously begotten offspring. The smaller nuclear family is symbolized in various cultures, as for example the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus; the holy family of Christianity consisting of Joseph (or God the Father), Mary, and Jesus; and the holy triad of the Yurak Samoyed: Nyebye-haha, the mother deity; Wesako-haha, her spouse; and Nyu-haha, their son. Curious variants appear in the enneads (triple triads) so characteristic of dynastic Egypt.

In its smallest possible configuration (apart from the single individual sometimes defined as family in the post-industrialized West)—as husband and wife—family appears in almost all mythologies. Universally, tales of the hieros gamos tell of the sacred marriage of Heaven and Earth from whom humanity springs, as illustrated by the Zuni Awitelintsita, the fourfold-containing Mother Earth, and Apoyan Ta ʾChu, the all-covering Father Sky. Often such etiological stories of how the world came to be tell how one or more of the children produced by the union separate the pair, often forcibly, to form the realms of earth and sky. Such is the case in the Vedic account of Dyaus and Prthivi.

Ancestors

Probably no members so fully embody both the ritual and the symbolic significance of the traditional extended family as do ancestors. From the Paleolithic period to the present, many cultures have venerated ancestors to varying degrees, although Herbert Spencer's theory that ancestor worship stands behind all religious practice has been generally discarded. For example, almost all Native American tribes believe that spirits of tribal ancestors return to earth to warn, protect, and instruct the living, although only specially trained shamans are capable of seeing them.

Babylonian mythology and artifacts incorporate important motifs of ancestor veneration. The failed attempt of the hero Gilgamesh to escape mortality by visiting his ancestor Utanapishtim, the Babylonian Noah who did escape it, indicates the salvific role hoped for from ancestors. Between the third millennium bce or earlier, when sacrifices were offered to the departed kings Shulgi and Gudea, and about 2500 bce, when Grimalsin of the second dynasty of Ur appears to have been deified while still living, two other important themes emerge: Ancestor worship by actual descendants tends to merge with homage paid by a whole people to departed rulers or "fathers." Thus, in many cultures ancestors function variously as objects of domestic and state devotion, a situation that became pronounced in the Roman Empire. Attribution of divine ancestry has been common for kings, as notably in post-Meiji Restoration Japan, where the emperor was officially proclaimed a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami. Such ancestry has even been assigned to whole peoples, as repeatedly shown in epic poetry.

So important are the honored ancestors in cultures such as those in China, Japan after Chinese contact (seventh century ce), and areas of Aryan influence, particularly India and Rome, that the traditional family often seems to exist more for their sake than for that of the living. This point indicates one theme present in the traditional family, its orientation toward death. Furthermore, because typically in these cultures ancestors collectively overpower and stifle the individuality now common in the Western world, ancestor veneration also highlights a second important theme: Family as corporate entity strongly opposes the individuality of its members.

Emphasis on ancestors indicates that family is not only the matrix within which an individual enters life but also the means by which he (less commonly she) achieves a kind of immortality. Paradoxically, this denial of death that leads to ancestor veneration makes the family a kind of perpetual cult of the dead enacted by the living.

Children

In contrast to dead family members, who are almost universally venerated, children are often treated ambivalently. Though desired in the abstract for perpetuating the family, children may be abused or even denied life, as in the ancient classical world. Hippocrates illustrates this point when he asks, "Which children should be raised?" The essentially universal theme of infanticide is clearly present in the biblical stories of Isaac and Moses, who were saved. To this day the practice continues sporadically for girls in parts of India and China, as historically had been the case almost worldwide.

The countertheme of life orientation surfaces most strongly in connection with those newborns elected to survive. Yet even here the tension of opposites is strained, for only some attain family membership. Commonly thought of as "natural," family construction is actually often highly artificial.

Birth, mating, and death, the three natural methods of creating, maintaining, and pruning families, are simultaneously both biological and socioreligious events. Successful delivery of a live baby does not guarantee the existence of a new family member. In many cultures, once a child is born (notably, in patriarchal Hellenic Greece or even contemporary China or India), the father must determine whether or not to keep it. Then it must be incorporated into the family. The contemporary Islamic Malays illustrate one variant of this once nearly universal practice: First, the father whispers into the infant's ear the Islamic call to prayer; next, a specially selected person touches certain objects to the baby's lips to guard against future lying and gossiping; then, forty-four days later, the father buries the placenta beneath a coconut palm seedling. These and other birth rituals help place the child in its familial and socioreligious context. Thus a new family member is "created" only in the most superficial way by its actual birth. Subsequent actions of family members, often other than the mother, bring the child fully into family life.

As a symbol of deity, the divine child appears in various traditions. Archaeological finds such as vase paintings and figurines depicting infancy themes and rituals place this concept at least as far back as the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (c. 7000–3500 bce) in Old Europe (roughly, southeastern Europe from Czechoslovakia to the Aegean). Motifs of birth and maturing of the infant later took shape mythically and cultically in many variations that recount the passion of the young god of vegetation. Representative is the cult of the infant Dionysos, originally Boeotian and Cretan but subsequently almost universal in Greece, in which the infant Dionysos-Zagreus is dismembered. According to myth, the Titans lured the child with rattles, knucklebones, a top, a ball, and a mirror, then cut him to pieces, cooked him, and devoured him. In some versions he is resurrected by the earth mother, Rhea. This death and resurrection theme, common to the complex of images central to agrarian religion, finds in the child (or alternatively in the seed) an appropriate image of renewal.

Worship of the divine child was originally shared by or even predominantly directed to the mother goddess, as in the case of Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele, whose son-consorts were of secondary importance. With time, however, the child, originally of either sex as suggested by numerous Sumerian female Marduks, ceases to be merely the child or sacrificial consort and becomes more and more an object of veneration in its own right. Christianity epitomizes this process whereby the divine child eclipses its mother.

In a very different form, images of the divine child as divine hero are also common in Native American mythology. This pattern is typified by the Haida story of Shining Heavens. One day a Haida woman was digging on the beach. Hearing a cry from a cockle shell, she uncovered it and found the baby Shining Heavens. She took him home and soon discovered his supernatural power, manifested in his ability to grow up almost immediately. This common motif of the wonder child who grows almost instantly from baby to strong youth or man is also illustrated by the Siouan Young Rabbit and the Algonquian Blood-Clot Boy. Sometimes the child-hero even makes plans in the womb, as do the Iroquoian twins Good Mind and Evil Mind. Such "unnatural" capabilities illustrate the power of godhead to transcend nature.

Such capability is even more apparent in the Vallabha and Caitanya sects of Hinduism, in which worship of the cowherd Kṛṣṇa as the divine child has been popular from at least 900 ce. In the spontaneity of his laughter, pranks, dancing, disobedience, and play, the child Kṛṣṇa symbolizes the unconditional nature of divinity. In such activity, engaged in for no purpose beyond sheer joy, the play of the child metaphorically expresses an aspect of divinity less easily rendered by "adult" personifications.

Mothers

So important is a woman's role as mother in most societies that the biblical Hebrews, for example, insisted that a wife who failed to bear children was obligated to provide her husband with a concubine (Gn. 16:2). According to popular Islamic tradition, the main duty of a woman is to obey and serve her husband respectfully; her second duty is to give him male heirs. In traditional China with its strong Confucian ethic, life was meaningless without sons. Without sons, a wife could count on a second wife essentially replacing her.

Theorists assume that the discovery of stockbreeding and planting taught humans about male reproductive capability. That means that for only about twelve thousand of the million years of hominid existence have humans understood paternity and reckoned male as well as female lineage. Thus was the ancient mother-child kin tie challenged by the familial tie. The nineteenth-century belief in mother right, espoused by J. J. Bachofen, Robert Stephen Briffault, Henry Maine, and others, whereby women were thought to have held social and political power during a prepatriarchal era, has long been invalidated; but current scholarship makes indisputable the existence of a practice of prehistoric mother worship in Europe and Asia Minor.

Material evidence in the form of large numbers of "Venuses," often with exaggerated secondary sex characteristics and pregnant bellies, as exemplified by the well-known Venus of Willendorf, firmly roots the idea of divine motherhood in the Upper Paleolithic period in Eurasia (c. 22,000 bce). By the time of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (c. 7000–3500 bce) in Old Europe and the Near East, the Great Mother, with her accumulated Paleolithic traits, is well established in the variant forms that generally characterize her in agricultural societies around the world. (In patrilineal totemic and patriarchal nomadic cultures she figures less prominently, as an adjunct to the dominant sky god.) Under various names she appears almost universally wherever agriculture develops—as Ishtar (Babylon and Assyria); Astarte (Canaan); Isis (Egypt); Cybele (Phrygia); Rhea, Gaia (pre-Hellenic Greece); Pṛthivī (Vedic India); Di (ancient China); Pachamama (Inca); and so on.

In cultures such as those of Old Europe, pre-Hellenistic Greece, and pre-Vedic India (Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro), which were not dominated by nomadic pastoral peoples, motherhood is typically aligned with a concept seemingly opposed to it—that of virginity. But this belief reflects the archaic notion that birth results from parthenogenesis, an understandable belief for those unaware of the male role. Far from being a moralistic concept, as it subsequently became in patrilineal and patriarchal cultures, it originally reflected an understanding of woman as creator and powerful figure in her own right.

Earth and related vegetal phenomena such as grains are not the only natural elements associated with motherhood. Water, the medium from which humans originally emerge onto land, also functions this way, as with the ancient Mexican goddess of the waters, Chalchiuhtlicue, and the water mother common to the ancient Karelians and other Finno-Ugric peoples. Sometimes, as with the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, or the pre-Islamic mother of the heavens Allat, or the Egyptian sky goddess Nut, the traditional association of earth with motherhood and of sky with fatherhood are reversed; consequently, the predominant associations do not always hold, as when the concept "down," normally affiliated with earth and motherhood, attaches to a male chthonic deity. The variant son-consorts of the mother goddess, such as Adonis and Tammuz, reflect this phenomenon.

Various interconnected processes particularly affect the ways motherhood is represented in divinity and vice versa. Specialization tends to separate qualities originally mixed together in a single great goddess figure into different embodying images, as exemplified by the goddesses of the Homeric pantheon. Artemis and Aphrodite, for example, both lose their original fullness of personality to become mainly associated with the hunt and with erotic love, respectively. In this way motherhood, especially in Western cultures dominated by monotheism, has typically been strictly separated from all other potential and actual attributes of womanhood. Thus hunting, wisdom, sex, and war, all attributes of the undifferentiated goddess, come to appear totally divorced from each other.

A related process polarizes "good" and "bad" qualities into beneficient and terrible goddesses. Such terrible mothers of death and destruction as the Hindu Kālī, the Aztec Tlamatecuhtli, and the Greek Medusa typify this process. Such splitting dichotomizes the originally unified cycle of birth and death, in which Mother Earth gives birth (often quite literally, as in the Greek story of Erichthonius and in the many Native American myths that portray humanity emerging from the womb of the Earth) and later takes back her dead for burial (as in the Pueblo belief that Shipapu, the underworld, is also the womb of the earth goddess, Natya Ha ʾAtse.) With polarization come goddesses of the underearth realm such as the Greek Persephone and the dread Sumero-Akkadian Ereshkigal, who are separate from beneficent counterparts such as Demeter and Ishtar.

In a variant process the single goddess multiplies, usually into a triad, as in the case of the Scandinavian Norns, the Greek Fates, or the strange matres and matrones figures from the Celtic and Germanic provinces of the Roman Empire. Such trinitarian representations often involve different stages of motherhood, as in various ubiquitous virgin-mother-crone triads (the Hindu Pārvatī, Durgā, and Umā and the Celtic Macha, Morríghan, and Badhbh, for example).

Fathers

Next to ancestors and frequently amalgamated with them conceptually, fathers hold the greatest power in traditional patriarchal families, whether or not their fatherhood is biological. This paradox is logical when fatherhood is divided into three categories: The genetic father fertilizes the ovum; the genitor contributes to the child's growth in the womb, as when the Holy Ghost causes Mary to conceive through her ear; and the social father, known as the pater, dominates family life. Whether as genetic father, adoptive father, or maternal uncle, the pater supplies the child's social position.

In a patrifocal extended family the pater, as oldest living father in a direct line of descent, firmly heads the family hierarchy. This pattern was thoroughly worked out in the Roman family, where patriarchal power was so complete that, until he died, the father retained limitless authority over unmarried daughters and grown sons and their children. A married daughter customarily joined the household of her husband and so came under the authority of his father. Such extreme paternal power distinguished the Roman father from fathers in other societies in degree, but not in kind.

In contrast to motherhood, which results from pregnancy and childbirth, fatherhood is not immediately self-evident. Nor can fatherhood be as readily represented in images. Development and evolution of the concept are consequently less certain and less easy to follow. Almost everywhere, the most archaic manifestation of divine fatherhood is the "high god" located in the sky. Typically this "father" is originally a creator whose traits include goodness, age (eternity), and remoteness from the world of human affairs. So transcendent is he that he often abdicates his role of creator, handing it over to a successor-demiurge. Consequently, he is seldom reverenced in cult and may even disappear entirely. Representative examples are the Australian All-Father deities Baiame, worshiped by the Kamilaroi, and Bunjil (of the Kulin tribes); the Andamanese Puluga; numerous African father gods such as Nzambi of the Bantu-speaking peoples and Nyan Kupon of the Tshis. Existence of a sky god of this sort is evident from Neolithic times on and may well go back to Paleolithic times, but hard material evidence to prove it is currently insufficient. Aside from images suggesting the bull-roarers universally associated with father gods, no images comparable to the Paleolithic Venuses have been discovered.

The fatherhood of such archaic deities is often less specifically biological than creative, as reflected by the terms Bawai and Apap, applied respectively by the African Chawai and Teso, which convey the fatherhood of God relative to creation. In this sense the supreme being is a "father" whether or not he creates in the well-known hieros gamos of Mother Earth and Father Sky or through powers entirely his, as Baiami does.

By contrast, in many less archaic mythological and ritualized conceptions, divine fatherhood is unmistakably biological. Here the archaic mating of Mother Earth and Father Sky, originally an abstract description of creation, becomes far more concrete. The sovereign father is typically eclipsed by his son, as is the Greek Ouranos by Kronos, the Australian Baiami by Grogoragally, the Tiv Awondo by the Sun. Thus, one theme typically connected to divine fatherhood in most mythologies is the generational conflict of fathers and sons. As the archaic father god recedes, the son who replaces him, even as he himself achieves fatherhood, seldom attains the stature of his own progenitor. This is indicated by his characteristic shift from sky god variously to solar or weather god (as when the weather god Zeus replaces Kronos) or agricultural deity (as when the Babylonian Marduk, both a solar and a vegetation deity, eventually supplants the Sumerian great triad of sky gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea), all of which lack the majestic connotations universally ascribed to the sky.

Particularly in the Chalcolithic cultures of the Near East (e.g., Sumer, Babylonia), where worship of the Paleolithic goddess developed strongly into the historic period, this shift is apparent. Here earth as mother, rather than sky as father, typically symbolizes the supreme being, rendering fatherhood a less exalted concept. The god is father solely as fecundator, being more often lover than spouse. Such vegetation gods as Adonis, Tammuz, and their myriad counterparts function this way.

In marked contrast to this biological, often chthonic, fatherhood is the refinement of sky-oriented fatherhood apparent in the monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and in dualistic Zoroastrianism, all of which developed out of patriarchal nomadic herding societies that retained more of the archaic religion than did their matrilineal agricultural counterparts. The biblical Yahveh, for example, is thought to have emerged from the celestial West Semitic deity known as Ya, Yami, or Yahu.

One of the attributes frequently credited to father-gods in almost all patriarchal cultures is that of giving birth: The biblical God creates life without aid from a female deity; Zeus produces Athena from his brow and gestates Dionysos in his thigh; the Scandinavian giant Ymir and the Aboriginal Australian Great Father, Kakora, both give birth from their armpits; and the Egyptian Khepri variously spits and masturbates to produce Shu and Tefnut, respectively.

In ritual, too, fathers often mimic the maternal role. Particularly among various Australian Aboriginal groups, initiation rites for boys, frequently reveal the fathers of a tribe functioning as male mothers, as they ritually mimic menstruation and "giving birth" to the young male initiates. Such sexual crossing over introduces into the concept of fatherhood several conflicting themes. Variously, fatherhood is as self-contained as motherhood in its parthenogenetic form; or it projects a "maternal" nurturing quality far different from the remoteness of the archaic sky god; or sometimes it deemphasizes sexual differentiation by blurring, a theme explicit in fertility figures such as Marduk, whose sex changes. These are just some of the ways in which concepts of fatherhood and divine fathers have developed their complexity worldwide.

Siblings

Symbolically, relationships between siblings are almost as central to religion and mythology as those between parents and children. This is partly because brothers and sisters are frequently also spouses, like Zeus and Hera, especially in creation myths, making the theme of incest a common universal mythologem. Almost universally, cross twins (those of opposite sex) are believed to have been the first humans from whom all others descend.

The first couple of the ancient Egyptian ennead were the twins Shu and Tefnut; the second were the brother and sister Geb and Nut, the father and mother of the Osirian gods. The Vedic twins Yama and Yami and the Norse Askr and Embla functioned similarly.

Some idea of the possible meanings of sibling "marriage," whether of twins or not, is evident from the Japanese myth of Amaterasu Ōmikami, the Heaven-Illuminating Goddess, and her brother Susano-o no Mikoto, the Valiant-Swift-Impetuous Hero. The rule of the universe was divided between these two: The realm of light, including heaven and earth, was presided over wisely by the sun goddess, while the ocean and the domain of hidden things was ruled widely by her stormy brother. In consequence of her brother's evil behavior, Amaterasu hid in a cave, plunging the entire world into darkness. When she emerged, light triumphed over dark, and her brother was banished to a remote region.

Most variants of this rivalry show the siblings as two brothers, often twins, as in the ancient Persian Zoroastrian myth of the twins Ōhrmazd ("light") and Ahriman ("darkness") or in the Iroquoian myth of Ioskeha, the creator and preserver, and Tawiskara, the deadly winter god. Unlike the Iroquoian pair, however, the Persian dyad, representing the principles of good and evil, respectively, set the stage for a dualistic system of thought in which both principles are equal.

Often sibling rivalry incorporates the theme of fratricide, as in the case of the Egyptian Seth who kills Osiris or the Greek brothers Ismenos and Kaanthos through whom fratricide was first introduced into the world. This common theme dramatizes the invidious distinction most cultures make between elder brothers and all other children. An Australian creation myth about two brothers traveling together at the beginning of time vividly dramatizes this distinction. When the elder brother desires a wife, he operates on his sibling, making him into a woman. The younger brother-turned-wife simply continues in the subordinate position he had occupied all along, making clear the equivalent impotence of younger brothers and wives.

All these sibling tales ring changes on certain important familial themes. Battling twins represent identity altering into difference; fighting sisters and brothers depict familial opposition; cohabiting sisters and brothers embody familial unity; and battling brothers symbolize the struggle between equality and hierarchy, as brotherhood gives way to the rights of the elder brother, the patriarch-to-be.

Servants

Of all the traditional family members, none so emphasizes the way family functions as both example and symbol of a hierarchical order as does the servant, the hired or enslaved person contributing to family life and economics in both agrarian and commercial settings. Particularly in its most extreme form, as slavery, servitude emphasizes the hierarchical nature of the traditional family. In ancient Hawaiian culture, for instance, one outcast social group, the kauwa, were designated to serve the chiefs and touch them directly. They alone were exempt from the kapu ("taboo") that prohibited touching the chiefs on pain of death. Yet these kauwa were themselves untouchable: It was not proper to eat with them or sleep close to them. At the death of their masters, they were buried alive, often as sacrificial atonement for kapu violations committed by others. While extreme, this example, like others involving Indian untouchable servants, American black slaves, and Middle Eastern eunuchs, clearly embodies the themes of scapegoating, sacrifice, and hierarchy common to families in general.

Certain religious traditions overtly take up the themes implicit in servitude, stressing them as positive rather than negative attributes, as in the cases of Hanuman, the perfect Hindu servant, and Christ, understood as fulfilling the promise of the servant poems of "Second Isaiah." Others simply portray servitude as an institution as natural to divinity as to humanity: In Japanese mythology, for example, the fox functions as the messenger of the god of harvests, Inari, much as Hermes serves the Greek Olympians. Among the Haida of the Northwest Coast, Old-Woman-under-the-Fire serves as messenger of the supernaturals, going between this world and that of the spirits. Servitude, exemplifying a humility appropriate to worshipers, characterizes many traditions; thus the Vedic Hindus feel like slaves in the presence of Varuṇa (Ṛgveda 1.25.1).

See Also

Ancestors; Child; Deus Otiosus; Domestic Observances; Goddess Worship; Hieros Gamos; Home; Sky; Supreme Beings; Twins; Virgin Goddess.

Bibliography

Besides canonical scriptures, the most useful primary texts for students of the family are the ancient religio-legal codes developed by most literate cultures. Representative is the Institutes of Hindu Law, or The Ordinances of Menu, according to the Gloss of Culluca; Comprising the Indian System of Duties, Religious and Civil, translated from the original Sanskrit by William Jones (1794; 2d ed., London, 1876); the ordinances cover a wide range of family-related topics, including divorce, remarriage, status of wives, and the like. An excellent compendium of various issues of concern to contemporary students of family is the Spring 1977 issue of Daedalus, which ranges from articles on specific cultures to family policy issues in the United States to the study of the history of the family.

Of the hundreds of recent works on family studies, Household and Family in Past Time, edited by Peter Laslett with the assistance of Richard Wall (Cambridge, 1972), is most representative of the controversial demographic approach. In this work Laslett presents his provocative, ground-breaking argument that the nuclear family preceded the industrial revolution and hence was causative rather than resultant. Also representative of the new demographic scholarship on family is Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Seider's The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago, 1977). For those who wish to pursue the historical aspects of family in depth, particularly by looking at small numbers of people in very precisely documented areas, the Journal of Family History (Worcester, Mass., 1796–) presents the most recent work.

Among numerous excellent sources of information on the mother goddess, two stand out for their lucidity: E. O. James's The Cult of the Mother-Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary Study (New York, 1959) and Marija Gimbutas's The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 b.c.: Myths and Cult Images (Berkeley, Calif., 1982). Somewhat more difficult to trace for lack of early material evidence and fewer books devoted exclusively to the subject is the concept of the father god. Helpful sources include E. O. James's The Worship of the Sky-God: A Comparative Study in Semitic and Indo-European Religion (London, 1963); Wilhelm Schmidt's The Origin and Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories (1931; New York, 1972), considered by many the locus classicus for its topic; and Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, 1958), in which see especially chapter 2, "The Sky and Sky Gods," and chapter 3, "The Sun and Sun-Worship." A helpful discussion of Kṛṣṇa as divine child appears in David Kinsley's The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Kṛṣṇa, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley, 1975). Much useful information on siblings appears in Donald J. Ward's The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1968).

New Sources

The Histoire de la famille, edited by André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Marin Segalen and Françoise Zonabend (Paris, 1986), is the basic work of reference. It contains historical chapters on Mediterranean antiquity, European Middle Ages and ancient Asia as well as anthropological surveys on family in today's Western and Eastern world. The three prefaces by an historian such as Georges Duby and two anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jack Goody are very inspiring from the methodological point of view. The well-organized bibliographies and the ample indexes are very helpful. Among the classics, N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique (Paris, 1872) and Edward Westermarck, A Short History of Marriage (London, 1926) are still worth reading as well as various essays on society and religion by Talcott Parsons. Philip Ariès, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1960); J. L. Flandrin, Familles. Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne société (Paris, 1976); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977) have been innovating historical studies. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, U.K., 1983) and The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive. Systems of Marriage and the Family in Pre-industrial Societies of Eurasia (Cambridge, U.K., 1990) by Jack Goody are provoking comparative surveys of pre-modern family institutions throughout the world who challenge many traditional assumptions.

Günther Kehrer, "Familie" in Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. 2, edited by H. Cancik, B. Gladigow and M. Laubscher (Stuttgart, Germany, 1990), pp. 404–414 is one of the very few accounts of the relationship between family and religion, written from the perspective of social scientific studies. Marzio Barbagli, "Famiglia. 1. Sociologia," in Enciclopedia delle scienze sociali, vol. 3 (Rome, 1993), is particularly useful for his ample bibliography.

For religions (especially religions of the Book) in the contemporary situations of American families, see the site of the "Religion, Culture, and Family Project," directed by Don Browning at the University of Chicago Divinity School (http://divinity.uchicago.edu/family/index.html), which addresses marriage, sex, and family issues from a range of theological, historical, legal, biblical, and cultural perspectives.

Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi (1987)

Revised Bibliography