Chapter IX: Totemism (2)

Whatever may have been the origin of Totemism the institution seems to have been utilised by some tribes in an ambitious attempt to control all nature by grouping (on very obscure principles, if on any) various classes of phenomena with the Totems, so that one clan or another is responsible for everything. Short of this, it is plainly necessary to control the wind, rain, hail and lightning. The control of an animal Totem is not always benevolent toward the animals themselves. In the Kakadu tribe it is the duty of the Mosquito clan to save the rest from mosquitoes; they make imitation mosquitoes, dance and sing, and imagine they are killing them.[542] In North America similar beliefs and practices have been found both for encouraging and for discouraging the Totem, but occasionally and irregularly. The Bird clan of the Omahas, when birds threatened the crops, prevented their devastations by chewing corn and spitting it about over the fields; when mosquitoes were troublesome, the Wind people flapped blankets to raise a wind and blow the pests away; when worms attacked the crops, the Reptile clan (worms and reptiles are confused in primitive Zoology) countermined their approaches by pounding up some of them with a little corn into a soup and eating it.[543] The most remarkable American rites for the increase of food—the Buffalo-dances and Corn-festivals of the Mandans—were not totemic, but carried out by the whole tribe. The buffalo hunting-dance to bring the herd within reach, was continued, if necessary, for weeks—in fact until the animals came; so that the Magic was always effectual.

§ 8. TOTEMISM AND ANIMISM

If the unity of clansmen with their Totem is very early conceived of as consisting in having the same, or the same sort of, soul, it is thenceforward essentially animistic. Yet this idea seems only very slowly to have led to any sense of dependence on the Totem as a spiritual power, or to any expectation that it would help or succour the clansmen, or (consequently) to the making of any appeal to it, except by magical coercion. Perhaps the earliest way in which the Totem was supposed to aid its clansmen was by omens; as a Black Duck man of the Yuin tribe (West Australia) thought that black ducks warned him against his enemies; but this is more characteristic of guardian spirits than of Clan-Totems. Occasionally in Australia we meet with something like a prayer to a Totem. On the Tully River (Queensland) we are told by Mr. W. E. Roth that before a man goes to sleep, or on waking in the morning, he utters in a low voice the name of the animal whose name he bears, or which belongs to his group; and that then, if edible, he will be successful in hunting it or, if dangerous, it will not hurt him without warning.

Professor Durkheim has an elaborate theory of the growth of divinities from Totems in Australia, especially in the example of Bungil, the Eagle-Hawk, a great phratry name-animal in several tribes.[544] He is a persuasive writer, but perverse and ingenious. Bungil receives neither prayer nor sacrifice (these, indeed, in the author’s view are not necessary to religion), and there is nothing to show that he differs from the other glorified Headmen who are found in Australia. The most plausible of these superior beings is Byamee of the Euahlayi, who is not a Totem, but the source of Totems, which are derived from different parts of his body. At funerals prayers are addressed to him for the souls of the dead; and, again, at the close of the Boorah (initiation rites) for long life, inasmuch as the tribesmen have kept his law.[545] We are told that the nearest mission-station is a hundred miles off, and recently established; but on reading further that only those who have been initiated can go to Byamee’s sky-camp, and that gross sinners are punished in the next life in Eleanbah Wundah, a place dark but for fires,[546] we cannot help reflecting that missionaries are not the only channels of sound doctrine.

The most authentic example of the rise of a Totem to something like divine rank is the Wollunqua, the great snake of the Warramunga, which differs from other Totems in being not a real animal but a mythological monster. It is not approached with prayer or sacrifice; but is the object of rites in part propitiatory, in part coercive, and is certainly regarded with superstitious awe much as a demon might be. To please the Wollunqua, the clan build a long mound and draw its representation upon it; which, however, afterwards meets with “savage destruction.” On approaching Thapanerlu, the sacred pool where it lives, they whispered to it “to remain quiet and do them no harm.”[547]

On the whole, funeral ceremonies, in Australia, to provide the dead with necessaries, food, utensils, warmth—even precautions against ghosts—come nearer to religious ideas than anything connected with Totemism. Among the Jupagalk (Victoria) a person when in great pain would call on some dead friend to come and help him, to visit him in a dream and teach a song against the evil magic that hurt him.[548]

In Yam Island (Torres Straits) there is a cult of two brothers, Maiou and Sigai, who are said to have come from Australia. They have shrines within a fence; women and uninitiated youths are not permitted to enter, and do not know that Maiou is the crocodile (Kodal), and Sigai the hammer-headed shark (Kursi); for they are always addressed and spoken of by their names as heroes, and not by their animal or Totem names. The shrines contain effigies made of turtle-shell representing the animals; and under each effigy is a stone in which the life or spirit of the Totem-hero resides. The natives, in the north-west monsoon, danced and sang before them for fine weather; and also on going to war, praying: “O Totem Sigai and Totem Maiou, both of you close the eyes of these men so that they cannot see us.”[549] This is indisputably Religion; it is not, however, pure Totemism, but apparently a fusion of hero-worship with the Totemism of the heroes. Another hero of more recent date, Quoiam, is worshipped in the neighbouring island of Mabuaig. He came from North Queensland; and his house and cairn are still shown on a hill-top. His Totem was the shovel-nosed skate, but he has undergone no fusion with that animal. We may be inclined to infer that the hero can stand alone, whilst a Totem needs the alliance of a hero to anthropomorphise it.

Such an inference is, on the whole, confirmed by the state of religion in Fiji. There, amongst the coastal tribes, Totemism is decadent and irregular; though even on the coast of Viti Levu there are deities with animal attributes, and especially with the power of changing into animals; and the animal connected with a god must not be eaten by people of the district where he is worshipped.[550] In the mountainous interior Totemism still flourishes, and animal-gods are worshipped which have been assumed to have originated in Totems. Dr. Rivers tells us[551] that he formerly assumed this, but is inclined to revise his opinion. The Fijian Snake-god Ndengei was, according to tradition, a man who came to the island from elsewhere; probably he made a great impression and was apotheosised. His character as a Snake-god may be derived from the snake’s having been his Totem. Probably god-like beings in Fiji were in many cases heroes, but a close relation with their Totem endued them with something of the animal nature. “The evolution would not be simply from Totem to god, but from hero and Totem together to god.”

Gods present in animals, sometimes in plants, were acknowledged in Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaii, Tonga; and, in fact, Polynesia is the region where, if anywhere, Totems contribute largely to the divine population. Rivers will not deny (_loc. cit._) that direct evolution of gods from Totems may have taken place; but he points out that in Samoa, for example, the Octopus-god (Ole Fe’e) was, according to tradition, brought to the island by a Fijian chief. Was then the mollusc or the chief the root from which the god grew up? In Savaii there were gods incarnate in men: one in an actual man who was a cannibal propitiated with human flesh; another, invisible to the people, though seen by strangers as a handsome young man wearing a girdle of leaves, was called the King of Fiji (Tuifiti). Other gods described by Turner[552] are Ole alii Fiti (chief of Fiji), who was manifest in an eel; and Tinalii (King of chiefs), who was associated with the sea-eel, octopus, mullet, and the ends of banana leaves. Fusion seems to have been common.

It must not, of course, be assumed that all animal gods are Totems. Among the ways in which animal gods may have arisen we cannot deny some place to Spencer’s hypothesis, that heroes have sometimes been worshipped as animals because they bore animal names; and, after their death, the eponymous animals, ever present to men’s eyes, superseded the heroes, and were connected with and transformed their legends. It is also conceivable that a hero has been worshipped in the form of an animal or plant, because he had announced that, after death, he would be in such an animal or plant; for at Ulawa (Solomon Isles) bananas were _buto_, things that might not be eaten, approached or beheld (according to Dr. Coddrington[553]), because an influential man had prohibited the eating of them, saying that, after death, he would be in the banana; and with so much influence he might, in favourable circumstances, have become a Banana-god. And, again, in Professor Westermarck’s opinion, “the common prevalence of animal worship is, no doubt, due to the mysteriousness of the animal world; the most uncanny of all creatures, the serpent, is also the one most generally worshipped.”[554]

But these considerations strengthen the probability that a Totem may sometimes become a god; having the general respect of the clan to begin with. Some Totems having been deified with the assistance of heroes, others may perhaps be elevated by the force of analogy; or, once the conception of a spiritual being has been reached—chiefly (as we suppose) by reflection on dreams—and animals and even inanimate things have been thought to have spiritual doubles, if then the Totem is conceived to have a spirit, and even the same as the clansman’s soul, if it is appealed to for assistance, if it sends omens, listens to prayer and accepts sacrifice, what is it but a god?

In North America the Totem seems nowhere to have been worshipped; and any tendency that may have existed to propitiate it was diverted by the superior fascination of the personal guardian-genius, to which sometimes costly sacrifices were made and even self-mutilations; as among the Mandans, who often cut off a finger to secure its favour.[555] On the other hand, a class of spirits was recognised in the “elder brother” of each species of animal (or of the most interesting species—bear, deer, snake, etc.—all of the totemic class), a being (in the words of an early missionary, 1634) “who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals,” and “marvellously great and powerful”:[556] it watches over the species and avenges its wrongs. In North-West America and throughout Siberia the Bear and the Raven are objects of religious reverence; not, indeed, as clan-totems, but for all men. Among the Gulf nations the Yuchis are Totemists, and a youth at his initiation is put under the care of his clan-totem, instead of a personal guardian-genius as among the northern tribes; he looks for protection, however, not to the living animals of the Totem species, but to superior beings, like the “elder brothers” of the species.[557] Similar to these must be the Beast-gods of the Zuni Indians, to whom they offer a portion of all game, praying that they will intercede for them with the Sun-Father. In South America, too, the Patagonians and Araucanians teach that each species of animal has a guardian spirit, who lives in a cave, and that the Indians themselves at death go to live with him. We can hardly doubt that in all these cases, the spirit-animals are in some way connected with totemic beliefs: if not gods, they are at least divine beings, and they exemplify a noble sort of mysticism that is natural to the Amerind imagination.[558]

Africa is the principal home of Zoolatry. The religion of the Bantu nations of South Africa is, indeed, ancestor-worship; and their serpent-cult seems to be an outgrowth of ancestor-worship (for they think that their dead return as serpents of various species according to rank); unless, indeed, it has been diverted to such a subordinate place from some more ancient superstition. In West Africa there are many Beast-gods, especially the leopard, hyena, crocodile and python. They do not, however, give much indication of totemic origin; and Sir James Frazer observes that, as the hereditary worship of animals in certain districts (as of the hyena at Accra) was not totemic, nor need similar practices have been so elsewhere.[559] Hence that the Egyptians worshipped certain animals, and that in the district of any animal’s worship it was not killed or eaten, cannot prove that the worship was totemic, unless it be shown that Totemism is the only road to Zoolatry; for, if there are other ways, any animal that becomes divine will, naturally, not be killed or eaten. On the other hand, that the Egyptians were not Exogamists does not prove they were not Totemists; since some known Totemists are not Exogamists. The natural impression of a student who merely comes amongst other things to Egyptian Religion is that Totemism was one of its sources; but it is a subject on which, more strictly than on most, only a few specialists can form a judgment.

On the whole, the contribution of Totemism to religion seems to have been greatly exaggerated. Compared with the influence of dead heroes and ancestors, or with the personification of the greater manifestations of nature—Sky, Sun, Thunder—it has been ineffective, falling short of the production of high gods; or if, as in Polynesia, it seems sometimes to have come near to that achievement, it may be suspected that its success owed much to an alliance with hero-worship.

FOOTNOTES:

[510] _Totemism and Exogamy_, I. p. 3. The definition occurs in a reprint of an earlier essay. A later definition (IV. p. 3) runs: “Totemism is an intimate relation which is supposed to exist between a group of kindred people on the one side and a species of natural or artificial objects on the other side, which objects are called the totems of the human group.” The relation appears to be one of friendship and kinship, on a footing of equality, not religious in Australia. I have, in this chapter, drawn freely upon the great mass of facts and speculations collected in _Totemism and Exogamy_; believing that in that work the author not only intended to present the evidence for his own conclusions, but had also the benevolent purpose of assisting the labours of those who might come after him. A heavy debt of gratitude is due; which, indeed, causes some embarrassment if ever one feels obliged to differ from him in opinion.

[511] _Totemism and Exogamy_, I. p. 4; cf. IV. pp. 3, 4. Perhaps the author no longer approves of the word “reverenced.” Totem and clan are rather on a footing of equality.

[512] _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, App. B.

[513] The animals are: Human 2, other Mammalia 31, Birds 46, Reptiles 51, Amphibia 1, Fishes 8, Insects 24, Mollusca 1.

[514] _Totemism and Exogamy_, II. p. 535.

[515] _Totemism and Exogamy_, III. pp. 90-100.

[516] Hose and McDougall, _Pagan Tribes of Borneo_, II. pp. 96-110.

[517] _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_, I. p. 201.

[518] _Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 101.

[519] _Secret of the Totem_ and _Social Origins_.

[520] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 330.

[521] _Native Tribes of Northern Territory of Australia_, p. 263.

[522] _Totemism and Exogamy_, IV. pp. 57-63.

[523] _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, 1909, p. 173.

[524] _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, 1909, p. 175.

[525] In the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, a man applies the name of “mother” to his real mother and also to his maternal aunts, who accept the relationship and may assert: “We all three of us bore him” (_Totemism and Exogamy_, I. p. 305 note). Is this what they believe, or what (following their system of class-nomenclature) they are accustomed to say?

[526] Page 125.

[527] See above, ch. ii. § 3.

[528] It is reasonable to suppose that a group named other groups to distinguish those around them, before needing to name itself. It follows that probably each group sometimes bore a different name when spoken of by each of several neighbours. How amidst such confusion could single names be fixed? Perhaps because the group designated adopted one of them; or by the elimination of the other names through many causes in course of time, in generations, in hundreds of years. The march of progress was leisurely in those days.

[529] Chs. iv., v., vi.

[530] Chs. xiv., xv., _Prohibition of Marriage between Kindred_.

[531] Ch. xl., _Marriage_.

[532] Langloh Parker, _The Euahlayi Tribe_, p. 21.

[533] _Totemism and Exogamy_, I. p. 489.

[534] _Ibid._, IV. p. 54.

[535] _Totemism and Exogamy_, I. p. 254.

[536] _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 388.

[537] _Totemism and Exogamy_, III. p. 13.

[538] Langloh Parker, _The Euahlayi_, p. 22.

[539] _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, ch. vi.; _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, ch. ix.

[540] There is, however, another possible reason for the eating by the clan or by its Headman of some portion of the food which they profess to supply to the rest of the tribe—namely, that it expresses a prior claim to some sort of proprietorship, which is then waived.

[541] _Totemism and Exogamy_, IV. pp. 55-7.

[542] Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes North. Ter. Aust._, p. 324.

[543] _Totemism and Exogamy_, III. pp. 104-5.

[544] _The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life_, II. ch. ix.

[545] Langloh Parker, _The Euahlayi Tribe_, pp. 458, 478, etc. In Eleanbah Wundah, they hold their right hands pressed against their sides, which A. Lang thought a remarkable image. It is, W. E. Roth tells us, gesture-language for sickness. (_Ethnological Studies in North-West Central Queensland_, p. 90.)

[546] _The Euahlayi_, pp. 4 to 8, and 78.

[547] _North. Ts. of C. Aust._, p. 253.

[548] Howitt, _Northern Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 435.

[549] Haddon, _Reports of the Expedition to Torres Straits_, V. pp. 37, 38.

[550] W. H. R. Rivers, _J. A. I._, 1909, p. 158.

[551] _J. A. I._, 1909, p. 163.

[552] _Samoa_, chs. iv., v.; especially pp. 28, 48, 62-3, 70, 75. Fiji had in some way deeply impressed the Samoan imagination.

[553] _The Melanesians_, p. 31.

[554] _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_, II. p. 590.

[555] _Totemism and Exogamy_, III.

[556] Quoted by Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, II. p. 244.

[557] _Totemism and Exogamy_, III. p. 311.

[558] On species-gods see Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, II. pp. 242-6.

[559] _Totemism and Exogamy_, II. p. 574.