Social Origins and Primal Law

CHAPTER VIII

THE ORIGIN OF TOTEM NAMES AND BELIEFS

Up to this point, we have treated of totems just as we find them in savage practice. We have seen that totem names are the titles of groups of kindred, real or imagined; they are derived from animals, plants, and other natural objects; they appear among tribes who reckon descent either on the sword or spindle side, and the totem name of each group is usually (but not in the case of the Arunta) one mark of the exogamous limit. None may marry a person of the same totem name. But, in company with this prohibition, is found a body of myths, superstitions, rites, magical practices, and artistic uses of the totem.185 We have shown (Chapter II.) that we cannot move a step without a clear and consistent hypothesis of the origins of Totemism. This we now try to produce.

SACRED ANIMALS IN SAVAGE SOCIETY

Savages, both in their groups of kin, in their magical societies, or clubs, and privately, as individuals, are apt to regard certain beasts, plants, and so on, as the guardians of the group, of the society, and of the private person. To these animal guardians, whether of the individual, the society, or the group of kin, they show a certain amount of reverence and respect. That reverence naturally takes much the same forms – the inevitable forms – as of not killing or eating the animal, occasionally praying to it, or of burying dead representatives of the species, as may happen. But I am unaware that the savage ever calls his personal selected animal or plant, or the guardian animal of his magical society (except among the Arunta, where the totem groups are evolving into magical clubs), by the same term as he applies to the hereditary guardian of his group of kindred; his totem, as I use the word. If I am right, this distinction has been overlooked, or thought insignificant, by some modern inquirers. Major. Powell, the Director of the Ethnological Bureau at Washington, appears to apply, the word totem both to the chosen animal friend of the individual, and to that of the magical society in America, which includes men of various group totems.186 He also applies it to the totem of the kin.

Mr. Frazer, too, writes of (1) The Clan Totem, (2) The Sex Totem (in Australia), (3) 'The Individual Totem, belonging to a single individual, and not passing to his descendants,' and even indicates that one savage may have five totems.187 This third rule as to the non-hereditable character of 'the individual totem' has, since Mr. Frazer wrote in 1887, been found to admit of more exceptions than we then knew. In a few cases and places, the animal selected by, or for, the private individual, is found to descend to his or her children. In my opinion it is better, for the present at least, to speak of such protective animals of individuals, by the names which their savage protégés give to them in each case: nyarongs (Sarawak) 'bush-souls,' (Calabar) naguals, (Central America) manitus (?) as among the Algonquins, Yunbeai in some Australian dialects, and so forth.188 I myself here use 'totem' only of the object which lends its name, hereditarily, to a group of kin.

PROPOSED RESTRICTION OF THE USE OF THE WORD 'TOTEM'

This restriction I make, not for the purpose of simplifying the problem of totemism by disregarding 'the individual totem,' 'the sex totem,' and so on, but because I understand that savages everywhere use one word for their hereditary kin totem, and other words for the plant or animal protectors of individuals, of magical societies, and so forth. The true totem is a plant or animal or other thing, the hereditary friend and ally – of the kin – but all plant or animal allies of individuals or of magical societies are not totems. Though the attitude of a private person to his nagual, or of a magical society to its protective animal, may often closely resemble the attitude of the group to its hereditary totem, still, the origin of this attitude of respect may be different in each case.

This is obvious, for the individual or society deliberately adopts an animal protector and friend, usually suggested in a dream, after a fast, whereas we can scarcely conceive that the totem was deliberately adopted by the first members of the first totem groups. Savages look on animals as personalities like themselves, but more powerful, gifted with more wakan, or mana, or cosmic rapport: each man, therefore, and each organised magical society, looks out for, and, for some reason of dream or divination, adopts, a special animal friend. But it is hard to believe that the members of a primeval human group of unknown antiquity, consciously and deliberately made a compact to adopt, and for ever be faithful to – this or that plant, animal, element, or the like – to be inherited in the female line. For, on this plan, the group, say Wolves, instantly loses the totem it has adopted.

We cannot prove that it was not so, that a primitive group of rudimentary human beings did not make a covenant with Bear, or Wolf, as Israel did with Jehovah, and as an individual savage does with his nyarong, or nagual, or manitu. This covenant, if made and kept by each group, would be the Origin of Totemism. But, with female descent, the covenant could not be kept. I am not certain that this theory, involving joint and deliberate selection and retention of a totem, by a primeval human group, has ever been maintained, unless it be by Mr. Jevons. 'The primary object of a totem alliance between a human kin and an animal kind is to obtain a supernatural ally against supernatural foes.'189 The term 'supernatural' seems here out of place – both the animal kind and the human kin being natural; and one has a difficulty in conceiving that very early groups of kin would make, and would adhere to, such alliances. Indeed, how could they adhere to their totems, when these descended through women of alien totem groups? But there seems to be nothing otherwise impossible or self-contradictory in this theory; nor can it be disproved, for lack of evidence. Only such theories as are self-contradictory, or inconsistent with the known and admitted facts of the case, are capable of absolute disproof.

It may, of course, be objected here that, though totems, in actual savage society, descend sometimes in the female line, still, descent in the male line may be the original rule; and that thus a group, like an individual, could seek, make a covenant with, and cleave to a grub, or frog, or lizard, as a supernatural ally. But, for reasons already indicated, in an earlier part of this work, I conceive that, originally, totems descended in the female line only. One reason for this opinion is that, as soon as descent of the totem comes by the male line, a distinct step in the upward movement towards civilisation and a settled life is made. It is not very probable that the backward step, from reckoning by male lineage to descent in the female line, has often been taken. On the other hand, tribes which now inherit the totem in the male line, exhibit in their institutions many survivals of female descent. An instance is that of the Mandans, as recorded by Mr. Dorsey.190 Among the Melanesians, where female descent still exists, there is at work the most obvious tendency towards descent through males, as Dr. Codrington proves in an excellent work on that people. Dr. Durkheim, too, has pointed out the traces of uterine descent among the Arunta, who now reckon in the male line.191 On the other hand, where we find descent in the male line, I am not aware that we discover signs of movement in the opposite direction. In this opinion that, as a general rule, descent was reckoned in the female, not the male line, originally, I have the support of Mr. E. B. Tylor.192 For these reasons the hypothesis of the selection of and covenant with a 'supernatural ally,' plant or animal, by the deliberate joint action of an early group, at a given moment, involving staunch adherence to the original resolution, rather strains belief; and a suggestion perhaps more plausible will be offered later.

THE WORD 'TOTEM'

As to the precise original meaning and form of the word usually written 'totem' – whether it should be 'totam,' or 'toodaim,' or 'dodaim,' or 'ododam,' or 'ote,' philologists may dispute.193 They may question whether the word means 'mark,' or 'family,' or 'tribe,' or clay for painting the family mark.194 When we here use the word 'totem' we mean, at all events, the object which gives its name to a group of savage kindred, who may not marry within this hereditary name. In place of 'totem' we might use the equivalent murdu of the Dieri, or gaura of the Kunundaburi.195

THE TOTEM 'CULT'

The 'cult,' if it deserves to be called a 'cult,' of the totem, among savages, is not confined to abstention from marriage within the name. Each kin usually abstains from killing, eating, or in any way using its totem (except in occasional ceremonies, religious or magical), is apt to claim i descent from or kindred with it, or alternations of metamorphosis into or out of it, and sometimes uses its effigy on memorial pillars, on posts carved with a kind of genealogical tree, or tattoos or paints or scarifies it on the skin – in different cases and places.

To what extent the blood-feud is taken up by all members of the slain man's totem, I am not fully aware: it varies in different regions. The eating or slaying of the totem, by a person of the totem name, is in places believed to be punished by disease or death, a point which the late Mr. J. J. Atkinson observed among the natives of New Caledonia (MS. penes me). Mr. Atkinson happened to be conversing with some natives on questions of anthropology, when his servant brought in a lizard which he had killed. On this one of the natives exhibited great distress, saying, 'Why have you killed my father? we were talking of my father, and he came to us' The son (his name was Jericha) then wrapped the dead lizard up in leaves, and reverently laid the body in the bush. This was not a case like that of the Zulu Idhlozi, the serpents that haunt houses, and are believed to be the vehicles of the souls of dead kinsfolk. The other natives present had for their 'father,' one, a mouse, the other a pigeon, and so on. If any one ate his animal 'father,' sores broke out on him, and Mr. Atkinson was shown a woman thus afflicted, for having eaten her 'father.' But I do not find, in his papers, that a man with a mouse for father might not marry a woman of the mouse set, nor have I elsewhere been able to ascertain what is New-Caledonian practice on this point.196 When Mr. Atkinson made these observations (1874), he had only heard of totems in the novels of Cooper and other romancers.

'TOTEM GODS'

This example is here cited because, as far as I am aware, no other anthropologist has observed this amount of Totemism in New Caledonia. Students are divided into those who have a bias in favour of finding totemism everywhere; and those who aver, with unconcealed delight, that in this or the other place there are no totems. Such negative statements must always be received with caution. An European may live long among savages before he really knows them; and, without possessing totemism in full measure, many races retain obvious fragments of the institution.

Mr. Tylor has censured the use of the terms 'totems' and 'totem clans' with respect to the Fijians and Samoans, where certain animals, not to be eaten, are believed to be vehicles or shrines of certain gods. It is a very probable conjecture (so probable, I think, as almost to amount to a certainty), that the creatures which are now the shrines of Fijian or Samoan gods of the family, or of higher gods, were once totems in an earlier stage of Samoan and Fijian society and belief. As I have said elsewhere, 'in totemistic countries the totem is respected himself; in Samoa the animal is worshipful because a god abides within him. This appears to be a theory by which the reflective Samoans have explained to themselves what was once pure Totemism.'197 But I must share in Mr. Tylor's protest against using the name of 'totem' for a plant or animal which is regarded as the shrine of a god. Such thorough totemists as some of the North American Indians, or the Australians, do not explain their totems as the shrines of gods, for they have no such gods to serve as explanations. That myth appears to be the Samoan or Fijian way of accounting for the existence of worshipful and friendly plants and animals.

Thus, at all events, and unluckily, the phrase 'the totem-god' is introduced into our speculations, and the cult of the 'totem-god' is confused with the much more limited respect paid by savages to actual totems. However attractive the theory of 'the totem-god' may be, we cannot speak of 'totems' where a god incarnate in a plant or animal is concerned. Such a deity may be a modified survival of Totemism, but a totem he is not. Moreover, it is hardly safe to say that, in the Samoan case, the god is 'developed from a totem;' we only know that the god has got into suspiciously totemistic society. On the whole, we cannot be too cautious in speaking of totems and Totemism: and we must be specially careful not to exaggerate the more or less religious respect with which totems are, in many cases, regarded. The Australians, as far as they have the idea of a creative being, Baiame, Nooreli, and so forth, do not regard their totems as shrines or incarnations of him. That appears to be the speculation of peoples who, probably by way of animism, and ancestor-worship, are already in the stage of polytheism. Totems, in their earliest known stage, have very little to do with religion, and probably, in origin, had nothing really religious about them.

SAVAGE SPECULATIONS AS TO THE ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM

Peoples who are still in the totemistic stage, as we have seen, know nothing about the beginnings of the institution. All that they tell the civilised inquirers is no more than the myth handed down by their own tradition. Thus the Dieri or Dieyrie, in Australia, say that the totems were appointed by the ancestors, for the purpose of regulating marriages, after consultation with Mura Mura, or with 'the' Muramura. The Woeworung, according to Mr. Howitt, have a similar legend.198 It is not necessary here to ask whether Mura Mura is 'the Supreme Being' (Gason, Howitt), or 'ancestral spirits' (Fison).199 The most common savage myth is of the Darwinian variety, each totem kin is descended from, or evolved out of, the plant or animal type which supplies its totem. Again, as in fairy tales, a woman gave birth to animals, whence the totem kins derive their descent. In North-West America, totems are often accounted for by myths of ancestral heroes. 'The Tlingit' (Thlinket) 'hold that souls of ancestors are reborn in children, that a man will be reborn as a man, a wolf as a wolf, a raven as a raven.' Nevertheless, the totems are regarded as 'relatives and protectors,' and it is explained that, in the past, a human ancestor had an adventure with this or that animal, whence he assumed his totem armorial bearings.200 In precisely the same way a myth, a very late myth, was invented, about the adventure of a Stewart with a lion, to account for the Lyon of the Stewarts.201 The Haidas and Thlinkets, believing as they do that human souls are reborn human, cannot hold that a bestial soul animates a man, say, of the Raven totem.

The Arunta, on the other hand, suppose that the souls of animals which evolved into human beings, are reincarnated in each child born to the tribe. 'Two clans of Western Australia, who are named after a small opossum and a little fish, think that they are so called because they used to live chiefly on these creatures.'202 This myth has some support in modern opinion: the kins, it is argued, received their totem names from the animals and plants which mainly formed their food supply; though now their totems are seldom eaten by them. These legends, and others, are clearly ætiological myths, like the Samoan hypothesis that gods are incarnate in the totems. The myths merely try to explain the original connection between men and totems, and are constructed on the lines of savage ideas about the relations of all things in the universe, all alike being personal, and rational, and capable of interbreeding, and of shape-shifting. Certain Kalamantans of Sarawak will not eat a species of deer, because 'an ancestor became a deer of this kind.'203 All such fables, of course, are valueless as history; and, in the savage state of the intellect, such myths were inevitable.

MODERN THEORIES

Mr. McLennan himself at first had a theory, which, as far as I heard him speak of it, was more or less akin to my own. But he abandoned it, says his brother, Mr. Daniel McLennan, for reasons that to him appeared conclusive. I ought to mention that Mr. A. H. Keane informed me, several years ago, that he had independently evolved a theory akin to mine, of which, as it then stood, I had published some hint. (For a statement of Mr. Keane's theory see our Preface.) In 1884204 I wrote, 'People united by contiguity, and by the blind sentiment of kinship not yet brought into explicit consciousness, might mark themselves by a badge, and might thence derive a name, and, later, might invent a myth of their descent from the object which the badge represented.' But why should such people mark themselves by a badge, and why, if they did, should the mark be, not a decorative or symbolic pattern, but the representation of a plant or animal? These questions I cannot answer, and my present guess is not identical with that of 1884.

Meanwhile let us keep one point steadily before our minds. Totemism, at a first glance, seems a perfectly crazy and irrational set of beliefs, and we might think, with Dr. Johnson, that there is no use in looking for reason among the freaks of irrational people. But man is never irrational. His reason for doing this, or believing that, may seem a bad reason to us, but a reason he always had for his creeds and conduct, and he had a reason for his totem belief, a reason in congruity with his limited knowledge of facts, and with his theory of the universe. For all things he wanted an explanation. Now what he wanted a reason for, in Totemism, was the nature and origin of the connection between his own and the neighbouring groups, and the plant or animal names which they bore. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen write, 'what gave rise, in the first instance, to the association of particular men with particular animals and plants, it is impossible to say.' But it is not impossible to guess, with more or less of probability. The connection once established, savages guessed at its origin: their guesses, as always, were myths, and were of every conceivable kind. The myth of descent from or kinship with the animal or plant, the Darwinian myth, does not stand alone. Every sort of myth was fashioned, was believed, and influenced conduct. Our business is to form our own guess as to the original connection between men and their totems: a guess which shall be consistent with human nature.

MR. MAX MÜLLER'S THEORY

Many such guesses by civilised philosophers exist. We need not dwell long on that of Mr. Max Müller, akin, as it is, to my own early conjecture, 'a totem is a clan mark, then a clan name, then the name of the ancestor of the clan, and lastly the name of something worshipped by the clan.'205 We need not dwell on this, because the kind of 'clan mark' on a pillar outside of the quarters of the clan, in a village, is peculiar to North America, and to people dwelling in fixed settlements. Among the nomadic Australians, we have totemism without the settlements, without the totem pillar, without the 'clan mark,' on the pillar, which, thus, cannot be the first step in Totemism. Again, the 'clan name,' or group name, must be earlier than the 'clan mark,' which merely expresses it, just as my name is prior to my visiting card, or as the name of an inn, 'The Red Lion,' is prior to the sign representing that animal. Obviously we have to ask first, whence comes the clan name, or group name?

THE THEORY OF MR. HERBERT SPENCER

In a passage on animal-worship, Mr. Herbert Spencer (unless I misconceive him) advances a theory of the origin of Totemism. True, he does not here speak of totems, but he suggests an hypothesis to explain why certain stocks claim descent from animals, and why these animals are treated by them with more or less of religious regard. Actual men, in savagery, are often called by 'animal nicknames,' and we cannot be surprised if the savage … gets the idea that an ancestor named 'the tiger' was an actual tiger … Inevitably, then, he grows up believing that his father descended from a tiger – thinking of himself as one of the tiger stock.206

It were superfluous to dwell on this theory. Totem names are group names; and, as they occur where group names are derived from the mother, they cannot have originated in the animal nicknames of individual dead grandfathers. The names of the dead are usually tabued and forgotten; but that is of no great moment. The point is that such group names are derived through mothers, in the first instance, not through male founders of families.207

No theory which starts from an individual male ancestor, and his name bequeathed to his descendants, can be correct. That Mr. Spencer's does start in this way may be inferred from the following text: 'commonly the names of the clans which are forbidden to intermarry, such as Wolf, Bear, Eagle, Whale, &c., are names given to men, implying, as I have before contended (170-173), descent from distinguished male ancestors bearing those names – descent which, notwithstanding the system of female kinship, was remembered when there was pride in the connection.'

A brief-lived joy in the name of which the male ancestor's descendants were proud, left them, in the second generation, under exogamy and female kin. Thus my father was nicknamed 'Tiger.' Proud of the title, I call myself Tiger. But I must marry a woman who is Not-Tiger, and my offspring are Not-Tigers. My honour hath departed!

MR. FRAZER'S THEORIES

The hypotheses of Mr. J. G. Frazer are purely provisional. He starts from the idea, so common in Märchen, of the person whose 'soul,' 'life,' or 'strength' is secretly hidden in an animal, plant, or other object. The owner of the soul wraps the 'soul-box' up in a mystery, it is the central secret of his existence, for he may be slain by any one who can discover and destroy his 'soul-box.' Next Mr. Frazer offers many cases of this actual belief and practice among savage and barbarous peoples; and, as a freak or survival, the idea is found even among the civilised. We meet the superstition in the Melanesian group of islands (where Totemism is all but extinct), and perhaps among the Zulus, with their serpent Idhlozi, whose life is associated with their own. Mr. Atkinson's New-Caledonians, however, did not think that death inflicted on their animal 'fathers' involved danger to themselves, though it distressed them, as an outrage to sentiment. Then we have the 'bush-souls' (one soul out of four in the possession of each individual), among the natives of Calabar. These souls, Miss Kingsley wrote, are never in plants, but always in wild beasts, and are recognisable only by second-sighted men. The 'bush-soul' of a man is often that of his sons: the daughters often inherit the mother's 'bush-soul:' or children of both sexes may take the bush-soul of either father or mother. The natives will not injure their bush-soul beasts. Nothing is known as to prohibition of marriage between persons of the same bush-soul. Here we have really something akin to the totem, the bush-souls being hereditary, at least for one generation. But this is among a house-dwelling, agricultural people, far above the state of real savagery: not among a 'primitive' people.

The Zapotecs of Central America, again, choose, by a method of divination, 'a tona or second self,' an animal, for each child, at its birth. It is, by the nature of the case, not hereditable. The nagual, usually a beast, of each Indian of Guatemala is well known; and is discovered, on the monition of a dream, by each individual. Therefore it cannot be hereditable. The sexes, in Australia, have each a friendly and protecting species of animal; say a Bat for all men, a Nightjar for all women: indeed, in Australia, all the elements of nature have their place in the cosmic tribe. To injure the animal of either sex, is to injure one of the sex. There is no secret about the matter.