this character.2 But he does not even raise this problem.
But this system is completely overthrown by the fact that the postulate upon which it rests can no longer be sustained. The whole argument of Frazer supposes that the local totemism of the Arunta is the most primitive we know, and especially
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that it is clearly prior to hereditary totemism, either in the paternal or the maternal line. Now as soon as the facts contained in the first volume of Spencer and Gillen were at our disposal, we were able to conjecture that there had been a time in the history of the Arunta people when the totems, instead of being attached to localities, were transmitted hereditarily from mother to child.1 This conjecture is definitely proved by the new facts discovered by Strehlow,2 which only confirm the previous observations of Schulze.3 In fact, both of these authors tell us that even now, in addition to his local totem, each Arunta has another which is completely independent of all geographical conditions, and which belongs to him as a birthright : it is his mother's. This second totem, just like the first, is considered a powerful friend and protector by the natives, which looks after their food, warns them of possible dangers, etc. They have the right of taking part in its cult. When they are buried, the corpse is laid so that the face is turned towards the region of the maternal totemic centre. So after a fashion this centre is also that of the deceased. In fact it is given the name tmara altjira, which is translated : camp of the totem which is associated with me. So it is certain that among the Arunta, hereditary totemism in the uterine line is not later than local totemism, but, on the contrary, must have preceded it. For to-day, the maternal totem has only an accessory and supplementary role; it is a second totem, which explains how it was able to escape observation as attentive and careful as that of Spencer and Gillen. But in order that it should be able to retain this secondary place, being employed along with the local totem, there must have been a time when it held the primary place in the religious life. It is, in part, a fallen totem, but one recalling an epoch when the totemic organization of the Arunta was very different from what it is to-day. So the whole superstructure of Frazer's system is undermined at its foundation.4
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IV
Although Andrew Lang has actively contested this theory of Frazer's, the one he proposes himself in his later works,1 resembles it on more than one point. Like Frazer, he makes totemism consist in the belief in a sort of consubstantiality of the man and the animal. But he explains it differently.
He derives it entirely from the fact that the totem is a name. As soon as human groups were founded,2 each one felt the need of distinguishing between the neighbouring groups with which it
2 Though considering totemism only a system of magic, Frazer recognizes that the first germs of a real religion are sometimes found in it (Fortn. Rev., July. 1905, p. 163). On the way in which he thinks religion developed out of magic, see The Golden Bough,' I, pp. 75—78.
1Sur le tote.rn.wme, in Annee Soc., V, pp. 82-121. Cf., on this same question, Hartland, Presidential Address, in Folk-Lore. XI, p. 75 ; A. Lang, A Theory of Arunta Totemism, in Man. 1904, No. 44 ; Conceptional Totemism and Exogamy, ibid., 1907, No. 55 ; The Secret of the Totem, ch. iv ; N. W. Thomas, Arunta Totemism, in Man, 1904, No. 68 ; P. W. Schmidt, Die Stellung der Aranda unter dw Australischen Stammen, in Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic, 1908, pp. 866 ff.
2Die Aranda, II, pp. 57-58.
3Schulze, lot.. cif., pp. 238-239.
4In the conclusion of Totemism and Exogamy (IV, pp. 58-59), Frazer says, it must be admitted, that there is a totemism still more ancient than that of the Arunta: it is the one observed by Rivers in the Banks Islands (Totemism in Polynesia and Melanesia, in J.A.I., XXXIX, p. 172). Among the Arunta it is the spirit of an ancestor who is believed to impregnate the mother ; in the Banks Islands, it is the spirit of an animal or vegetable, as the theory supposes. But as the ancestral spirits of the Arunta have an animal or vegetable form, the difference is slight. Therefore we have not mentioned it in our exposition.
1Social Origins. London, 1903, especially ch. viii, entitled The Origin of Totem Names and Beliefs, and The Secret
of the Totem, London, 1905.
2 In his Social Origins especially, Lang attempts to reconstitute by means of conjecture the form which these
came into contact and, with this end in view, it gave them different names. The names were preferably chosen from the surrounding flora and fauna because animals and plants can easily be designated by movements or represented by drawings.3 Tlie more or less precise resemblances which men may have with such and such objects determined the way in which these collective denominations were distributed among the groups.4
Now, it is a well-known fact that " to the early mind names, and the things known by names, are in a mystic and transcendental connection of rapport."5 For example, the name of an individual is not considered as a simple word or conventional sign, but as an essential part of the individual himself. So if it were the name of an animal, the man would have to believe that he himself had the most characteristic attributes of this same animal. This theory would become better and better accredited as the historic origins of these denominations became more remote and were effaced from the memory. Myths arose to make this strange ambiguity of human nature more easily representable in the mind. To explain this, they imagined that the animal was the ancestor of the men, or else that the two were descended from a common ancestor. Thus came the conception of bonds of kinship uniting each clan to the animal species whose name it bore. With the origins of this fabulous kinship once explained, it seems to our author that totemism no longer contains a mystery.
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But whence comes the religious character of the totemic beliefs and practices ? For the fact that a man considers himself an animal of a certain species does not explain why he attributes marvellous powers to this species, and especially why he renders a cult to the images symbolizing it.—To this question Lang gives the same response as Frazer : he denies that totemism is a religion. " I find in Australia," he says, " no example of religious practices such as praying to, nourishing or burying the totem."1 It was only at a later epoch, when it was already established, that toteroism was drawn into and surrounded by a system of conceptions properly called religious. According to a remark of Howitt,2 when the natives undertake the explanation of the totemic institutions, they do not attribute them to the totems themselves nor to a man, but to some supernatural being such as Bunjil or Baiame. " Accepting this evidence," says Lang, " one source of the ' religious ' character of totemism is at once revealed. The totemist obeys the decree of Bunjil, or Baiame, as the Cretans obeyed the divine decrees given by Zeus to Minos." Now according to Lang the idea of these great divinities arose outside of the totemic system ; so this is not a religion in itself ; it has merely been given a religious colouring by contact with a genuine religion.
But these very myths contradict Lang's conception of totemism. If the Australians had regarded totemism as something human and profane, it would never have occurred to them to make a divine institution out of it. If, on the other hand, they have felt the need of connecting it with a divinity, it is because they have seen a sacred character in it. So these mythological interpretations prove the religious nature of totemism, but do not explain it.
Moreover, Lang himself recognizes that this solution is not sufficient. He realizes that totemic things are treated with a religious respect;3 that especially the blood of an aninial, as well as that of a man, is the object of numerous interdictions, or, as he says, taboos which this
primitive groups should have ; but it seems superfluous to reproduce these hypotheses, which do not affect his theory of totemism.
3 On this point, Lang approaches the theory of Julius Pickler (see Pickler and Szomolo, Der Ursprung des Totemismus. Ein Beitrag zur materialistirchen Geschichtstheorie, Berlin, 36 pp. in 8vo). The difference between the two hypotheses is that Pickler attributes a higher importance to the pictorial representation of the name than to the name itself.
4Social Origins, p. 166.
5The Secret of the Totem, p. 121 ; cf. pp. 116. 117.
1The Secret of the Totem, p. 136. J.A.I., Aug., 1888, pp. 53-54 ; cf. Nat. Tr., pp. 80, 488, 498.
2With reverence," as Lang says (The Secret of the Totem, p. ill). Lang adds that these taboos are the basis of exogamic practices. Ibid., p. 125.
3
comparatively late mythology cannot explain.4 Then where do they come from ? Here are the words with which Lang answers this question : "As soon as the animal-named groups evolved the universally diffused beliefs about the wakan or mana, or mystically sacred quality of the blood as the life, they would also develop the various taboos."5 The words wakan and mana, as we shall see in the
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following chapter, involve the very idea of sacred-ness itself; the one is taken from the language of the Sioux, the other from that of the Melanesian peoples. To explain the sacred character of totemic things by postulating this characteristic, is to answer the question by the question. What we must find out is whence this idea of vsakan comes and how it comes to be applied to the totem and all that is derived from it. As long as these two questions remain unanswered, nothing is explained.
V
We have now passed in review all the principal explanations which have been given for totemic beliefs,1 leaving to each of them its own individuality. But now that this examination is finished, we may state one criticism which addresses itself to all these systems alike.
If we stick to the letter of the formulae, it seems that these may be arranged in two groups. Some (Frazer, Lang) deny the religious character of totemism ; in reality, that amounts to denying the facts. Others recognize this, but think that they can explain it by deriving it from an anterior religion out of which totemism developed. But as a matter of fact, this distinction is only apparent: the first group is contained within the second. Neither Frazer nor Lang have been able to maintain their principle systematically and explain totemism as if it were not a religion. By the very force of facts, they have been compelled to slip ideas of a religious nature into their explanations. We have just seen how Lang calls in the idea of sacredness, which is the cardinal idea of all religion. Frazer, on his side, in each of the theories which he has successively proposed, appeals openly to the idea of souls or spirits ; for according to him, totemism came from the fact that men thought they could deposit their souls in safety in some external object, or else that they attributed conception to a sort of spiritual fecundation of which a spirit was the agent. Now a soul, and still more, a spirit, are sacred things and the object of rites ; so the ideas expressing them are essentially religious and it is therefore in vain that Frazer makes totemism a mere system of magic, for he succeeds in explaining it only in the terms of another religion.
We have already pointed out the insufficiencies of animism and naturism ; so one may not have recourse to them, as Tyior
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and Jevons do, without exposing himself to these same objections. Yet neither Frazer nor Lang seems to dream of the possibility of another hypothesis.1 On the other hand, we know that totemism is tightly bound up with the most primitive social system which we know, and in all probability, of which we can conceive. To suppose that it has developed out of another religion, differing from it only in degree, is to leave the data of observation and enter into the domain of arbitrary and unverifiable conjectures. If we wish to remain in harmony with the results we have already obtained, it is necessary that while affirming the religious nature of totemism, we abstain from deriving it from another different religion. There can be no hope of assigning it non-religious ideas as its cause. But among the representations entering into the conditions from which it results, there may be some which directly suggest a religious nature of themselves. These are the ones we must look for.
4
5
1 However, we have not spoken of the theory of Spencer. But this is because it is only a part of his general theory of the transformation of the ancestor-cult into the nature-cult. As we have described that already, it is not necessary to repeat it.
1 Except that Lang ascribes another source to the idea of the great gods : as we have already said, he believes that this is due to a sort of primitive revelation. But Lang does not make use of this idea in his explanation of totemism.
CHAPTER VI
ORIGINS OF THESE BELIEFS—Continued
The Notion of the Totemic Principle, or Mana, and the Idea of Force
SINCE individual totemism is later than the totemism of the clan, and even seems to be derived from it, it is to this latter form that we must turn first of all. But as the analysis which we have just made of it has resolved it into a multiplicity of beliefs which may appear quite heterogeneous, before going farther, we must seek to learn what makes its unity.
We have seen that totemism places the figured representations of the totem in the first rank of the things it considers sacred ; next come the animals or vegetables whose name the clan bears, and finally the members of the clan. Since all these things are sacred in the same way, though to different degrees, their religious character can be due to none of the special attributes distinguishing them from each other. If a certain species of animal or vegetable is the object of a reverential fear, this is not because of its special properties, for the human members of the clan enjoy this same privilege, though to a slightly inferior degree, while the mere image of this same plant or animal inspires an even more pronounced respect. The similar sentiments inspired by these different sorts of things in the mind of the believer, which give tnem their sacred character, can evidently come only from some common principle partaken of alike by the totemic emblems, the men of the clan and the individuals of the species serving as totem. In reality, it is to this common principle that the cult is addressed. In other words, totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them. No one possesses it entirely and all participate in it. It is so completely independent of the particular subjects in whom it incarnates itself, that it precedes them and survives them. [188]
pass and are replaced by others ; but this force always remains actual, living and the same. It animates the generations of today as it animated those of yesterday and as it will animate those of to-morrow. Taking the words in a large sense, we may say that it is the god adored by each totemic cult. Yet it is an impersonal god, without name or history, immanent in the world and diffused in an innumerable multitude of things.
But even now we have only an imperfect idea of the real ubiquity of this quasi-divine entity. It is not merely found in the whole totemic species, the whole clan and all the objects symbolizing the totem : the circle of its action extends beyond that. In fact, we have seen that in addition to the eminently holy things, all those attributed to the clan as dependencies of the principal totem have this same character to a certain degree. They also have something religious about them, for some are protected by interdictions, while others have determined functions in the ceremonies of the cult. Their religiousness does not differ in kind from that of the totem under which they are classified ; it must therefore be derived from the same source. So it is because the totemic god—to use again the metaphorical expression which we have just employed—is in them, just as it is in the species serving as totem and in the men of the clan. We may see how much it differs from the beings in which it resides from the fact that it is the soul of so many different beings.
But the Australian does not represent this impersonal force in an abstract form. Under the influence of causes which we must seek, he has been led to conceive it under the form of an animal or vegetable species, or, in a word, of a visible object. This is what the totem really consists in : it is only the material form under which the imagination represents this immaterial substance, this energy diffused through all sorts of heterogeneous things, which alone is the real object of the cult. We are now in a better condition for understanding what the native means when he says that the men of the Crow phratry, for example, are crows. He does not exactly mean to say that they are crows in the vulgar and empiric sense of the term, but that the same principle is found in all of them, which is their most essential characteristic, which they have in common with the animals of the same name and which is thought of under the external form of a crow. Thus the universe, as totemism conceives it, is filled and animated by a certain number of forces which the imagination represents in forms taken, with only a few exceptions, from the animal or vegetable kingdoms :
there are as many of them as there are clans in the tribe, and each of them is also found in certain categories of things, of which it is the essence and vital principle.
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When we say that these principles are forces, we do not take the word in a metaphorical sense ; they act just like veritable forces. In one sense, they are even material forces which mechanically engender physical effects. Does an individual come in contact with them without having taken proper precautions ? He receives a shock which might be compared to the effect of an electric discharge. Sometimes they seem to conceive of these as a sort of fluid escaping by points.1 If they are introduced into an organism not made to receive them, they produce sickness and death by a wholly automatic action.2 Outside of men, they play the role of vital principle ; it is by acting on them, we shall see,3 that the reproduction of the species is assured. It is upon them that the universal life reposes.
But in addition to this physical aspect, they also have a moral character. When someone asks a native why he observes his rites, he replies that his ancestors always have observed them, and he ought to follow their example.4 So if he acts in a certain way towards the totemic beings, it is not only because the forces resident in them are physically redoubtable, but because he feels himself morally obliged to act thus ; he has the feeling that he is obeying an imperative, that he is fulfilling a duty. For these sacred beings, he has not merely fear, but also respect. Moreover, the totem is the source of the moral life of the clan. All the beings partaking of the same totemic principle consider that owing to this very fact, they are morally bound to one another ;
they have definite duties of assistance, vendetta, etc., towards each other ; and it is these duties which constitute kinship. So while the totemic principle is a totemic force, it is also a moral power ; so we shall see how it easily transforms itself into a divinity properly so-called.
Moreover, there is nothing here which is special to totemism. Even in the most advanced religions, there is scarcely a god who has not kept something of this ambiguity and whose functions are not at once cosmic and moral. At the same time that it is a spiritual discipline, every religion is also a means enabling men to face the world with greater confidence. Even for the Christian, is not God the Father the guardian of the physical order as well as the legislator and the judge of human conduct ?
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II
Perhaps someone will ask whether, in interpreting totemism thus, we do not endow the native with ideas surpassing the limits of his intellect. Of course we are not prepared to affirm that he represents these forces with the relative clarity which we have been able to give to them in our analysis. We are able to show quite clearly that this notion is implied by the whole system of beliefs which it dominates ; but we are unable to say how far it is conscious and how far, on the contrary, it is only implicit and confusedly felt. There is no way of determining just what degree of clarity an idea like this may have in obscure minds. But it is well shown, in any case, that this in no way surpasses the capacities of the primitive mind, and on the contrary, the results at which we have just arrived are confirmed by the fact that either in the societies closely related to these Australian tribes, or even in these tribes themselves, we find, in an explicit form, conceptions which differ from the preceding only by shades and degrees.
The native religions of Samoa have certainly passed the totemic phase. Real gods are found
1For example, in a Kwakiuti myth, an ancestral hero pierces the head of an enemy by pointing a finger at him (Boas, Vth Rep. on the North. Trues of Canada, B.A.A.S., 1889, p. 30).
2References supporting this assertion will be found on p. 128, n. I, and p. 320, n. l.
3See Bk. Ill, ch. ii.
4See, for example, Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 482 ; Schiirmann. The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln, in Woods, Nat. Tr. of S. Australia, p. 231.