Andrew Lang

“ Here it may be noted that the simplest and apparently the easiest theory of the origin of totemism is merely to suppose that a man, or with female descent a woman, made his or her personal totem hereditary for ever in his or her descendants. ”

“ The supreme or superior being of low savage religion or mythology is never a totem. He may be able, like Zeus in Greek mythology, to assume any shape he pleases; and in the myths of some Australian tribes he ordained the institution of totemism. Byamee, among the Euahlayi tribe of north-west New South Wales, had all the totems in him, and when he went to his paradise, Bullimah, he distributed them, with the marriage rules, among his people. ”

“ According to Mrs Bates, some tribes in the north of South Australia, tribes with the same “class” names as the Arunta, hold that to have children a man must possess two spirits (ranee) . If he has but one, he remains childless. If he has two, he can dream of an animal, or other object, which then passes into his wife, and is born as a child, the animal thus becoming the child's totem. This belief does not appear to apply to; reproduction in the lower animals. It is a spiritual theory of the begetting of a soul incarnated. ”

“ In their myths as to the origin of totemism, savages vary as much as the civilized makers of modern hypotheses. Some claim descent from the totem object; others believe that an original race of animals peopled the world; animals human in character, but bestial, vegetable, astral or what not, in form. These became men, while retaining the rapport with their original species; or their spirits are continually reincarnated in women and are born again (Arunta of Messrs Spencer and Gillen) ”

“ In Fiji the mother sees the animal, which does not affect conception, and “is merely an omen for the child already conceived.” But in Western Australia, as we have seen, the husband dreams of an animal, which is supposed to follow him home, and to be the next child borne by his wife. If it is correctly stated that when the husband has dreamed of no animal, while nevertheless his wife has a baby, the husband spears the man whom he suspects of having dreamed of an animal, the marital jealousy takes an unusual form and human life becomes precarious. ”

“ As in parts of South Africa, where a tribe, not a kin, has a sacred animal, as in Fiji, he seems to be the one survivor of many totems, the totem of some dominant local totem group, before which the other totems have fled, or but dimly appear, or are vehicles of gods, or, in Africa, of ancestral spirits. ”

“ In a place where totemism is absent it does not prima facie seem likely that we shall discover “the primitive system of conceptional totemism.” The Banks' Islanders have no totemism at all. But they have a certain superstition applying to certain cases, and that superstition resembles Arunta and Loritja beliefs, in which Mr Frazer finds the germs of totemism. The superstition, however, has not produced any kind of totemism in the Banks' group of isles, at least, no totemism is found. ”

“ If a man has but one spirit, he cannot give one to a child, therefore he is childless.
It is clear that this, and all other systems in which reproduction is explained in spiritual terms, can only arise among peoples whose whole mode of thinking is intensely “animistic.” It is also plain that all such myths answer two questions— (1) How does a being of flesh and spirit acquire its spiritual part?— (2) How is it that every human being is in mystical rapport with an animal, plant, or other object, the totem? ”

“ Of the origin of these beliefs, which have practical effects in the evolution of society and religion, much, we saw, is conjectured, but as we know no race in the act of becoming totemic—as in all peoples which we can study totemism is an old institution, and in most is manifestly decaying or being transmuted—we can only form the guesses of which examples have been given. ”

“ Such a system would explain very simply why every man gives the name of wife to a whole group of women, and every woman gives the name of husband to a whole group of men,” and so on with all such collective terms of relationship. ”

“ Not worshipping ancestral spirits, an Australian will not, like an ancestor worshipping African, explain his totem as an ancestral spirit. But where, as in the north and centre, he has an elaborate philosophy of spirits, there the primal totems exude spirits which are incarnated in women. ”

“ Australia, with North America, provides the examples of those institutions which seem to be “nearest to the beginning,” and in Australia the phenomena have been most carefully and elaborately observed among peoples the least sophisticated. In North America most that we know of many great tribes, Iroquois, Hurons, Delawares and others, was collected long ago, and when precision was less esteemed, while the tribes have been much contaminated by our civilization. ”

“ Sibokoism, the presence of a sacred animal in a local tribe, can hardly be called totemism, though it is probable that the totem of the leading totem kin, among several such totem kins in a tribe, has become dominant, while the others have become obsolete. ”

“ The idea being that the fabled primal ancestors male and female in each wandering group of miracle-workers were always all of one totem, it follows that, if not celibate, which these savages never are, they must have cohabited with women of their own totem, and, by the existing Arunta system, there is no reason why they should not have done so. In no other field of research is historical value attributed to savage legends about the inscrutable past that lies behind existing institutions. ”

“ It is objected, as to the origin of totemism, that too much influence is given to accident, too little to design. The answer is that “accident” plays a great part in all evolution, and that, in the opposed theory, the existence and actual exogamous function of totems is also accidental, arising from ignorance and a peculiar superstition. It is urged that no men would accept a nickname given from without by hostile groups. ”

“ Among the many guesses at the original purpose of totemism, one has been that the primal intention of totem sets of human beings was to act as magical co-operative stores for supplying increased quantities of food to the tribe. ”

“ As a man thus calls all the women whom he might legally have married by the same term as he calls his wife, and calls all children of persons of his own “age-grade,” class and status by the same name as he calls his own children, many theorists hold this to be a proof of the origin of the nomenclature “in a system of group marriage in which groups of men exercised marital rights over groups of women, and the limitation of one wife to one husband was unknown. ”

“ Thus, if the prohibition be based on aversion to unions of persons closely akin by blood, as the actual father is excluded, the actual father, among the Arunta, is, or has been, amongst that people, regarded as near of blood to his daughters. The Arunta are ignorant, we are told, of the part of the male in procreation. ”

“ If any women except my actual sisters were, before the new rule, reckoned as socially my sisters, all women in the tribe of a certain status must have been so reckoned, If all dangerous, I must marry none of them. ”

“ The phratries (often known by names of animals, as Eagle Hawk and Crow, Crow and White Cockatoo) contain each a number of totem kins, as Dog, Wild Cherry, Wombat, Frog, Owl, Emu, Kangaroo, and so on, and (except among the Arunta “nation” of five tribes in Central Australia) the same totem kin never occurs in both phratries. Thus as all persons except in the Arunta nation, marry out of their own phratry, none can marry into his or her totem kin. ”

“ The supposed original legislative exogamous division produced a very different effect than that said to be aimed at, namely, the prohibition of marriage between brothers and sisters. It forbade to every man marriage with half the women of his tribe, most of whom were not, even in the wide native use of the term, his “tribal” sisters, that is, women in a man's phratry of the same status as his own sisters. ”

“ It appears, then, that a man, having several totems, all the totems in his “clan,” must marry a woman of another “clan” who has all the totems of her “clan.”
Similar multiplicity of totems, each individual having a number of totems, is described in Western Australia (Mrs Bates) . In this case the word “totem” seems to be used rather vaguely and the facts require elucidation and verification. In this part of Australia, as in Fiji [72] “pour la naissance . . . l'apparition du totem-animal avait toujours lieu.” ”

“ The Euahlayi call the personal totem Yunbeai, the true totem they style Dhe. They may eat their real but not their personal totems, which answer to the hares and black cats of our witches.
Three or four other examples of tribes in which “personal totems” are “given” to lads at initiation are recorded by Howitt. [77] The custom appears to be less common in Australia than in America and Africa (except in South Australia, where people may have a number of “personal totems”) . In one case the “personal totem” came to a man in a dream, as in North America. ”

“ That system is strictly confined to the group of tribes (Ilpirra, Loritja, Unmaterja, Kaitish, Arunta) which constitute “the Arunta nation.” Elsewhere the belief in spiritual conception widely prevails, but not the belief in the connexion of spirits of individuals with the stone churinga of individuals. Consequently the Arunta system of marriage within the totem exists nowhere, and the non-exogamous non-hereditary totem exists nowhere, except in the Arunta region. Everywhere else hereditary totems are exogamous. ”

“ Sex-Totems.—The so-called “sex totem” is only reported in Australia. Each sex is supposed by some tribes to have its patron animal, usually a bird, and to injure the creature is to injure the sex. When lovers are backward the women occasionally kill the animal patron of the men, which produces horseplay, and “a sort of jolly fight,” like sky-larking and flirtation. ”

“ Every Arunta born incarnates a pre-existent primal spirit attached to one of the stone churinga dropped by primal totemic beings, all of one totem in each case, at a place called an oknanikilla. Each child belongs to the totem of the primal beings of the place, where the mother became aware of the child's life. ”

“ It is maintained in this theory that Australian blacks, who are reflective and by no means illogical men, have long ago observed that certain marriages are rigorously barred by their social system, for no obvious reason. Thus a man learns that he must not marry in his own main exogamous division, say Eagle Hawk. He must choose a wife from the opposite division, Crow. She must belong to a certain set of women in Crow, whose tribal status is precisely that, in Crow, of his own sisters, and his “little sisters” (the women of his sister's status) in Eagle Hawk. ”

“ Let two such groups, Emu and Kangaroo, tired of fighting for women, make peace with connubium, then we have two phratries, exogamous and intermarrying, Emu and Kangaroo, with totem kins within them. (Another hypothesis is necessary if the original rule of all was, as among the Urabunna and other tribes, that each totem kin must marry out of itself into only one other totem kin. [42] But we are not sure of the fact of one totem to one totem marriage.) ”

“ Suppose such a society to reach the dimensions of a tribe. The rules that applied to brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, would persist, and the original names for persons in such relationships in the family would be extended, in the tribe, to all persons of the same status: new terms being adopted, or old terms extended, to cover new social relationships created by social laws in a wider society.
Another Theory of the Origin of Totemism and Exogamy.—How this would happen may be seen in studying the other hypothesis of exogamy and totemism. ”

“ The reformers, by the theory, were perfectly able to distinguish consanguineous kinsfolk, so that they might easily have forbidden them to intermarry; while if all the members of the tribe were not in the classificatory degrees of relationship, who were? How were persons in classificatory relationships with each other discriminated from other members of the tribe who were not? They were easily discriminated as soon as the phratries were instituted, but, we think, not before. ”

“ The degree of “religious” regard for the revered object increases in proportion as it is taken to contain the spirit of an ancestor or to be the embodiment of a god: ideas not found among the most backward savages. ”

“ Howitt says precisely the same thing about the paternal practice of the Dieri. Thus there is no reason for denying that the change from female to male descent can be made by Australian as readily as by American tribes. We have given evidence for every step in the transition. The opposite opinion arose merely in an attempt to save the primitiveness of the Arunta, some of whom actually still make the maternal totem hereditary. ”

“ Surely neither the belief in spirits, nor the elaborate working out of the belief connecting spirits with manufactured stone amulets, can have been primitive. Nobody will say that peculiar stone amulets and the Arunta belief about spirits associated with them are primitive. To this M Van Gennep makes no reply. ”

“ The truth is that all attempts to trace the origin and growth of human institutions without the intervention of human intelligence and will are radically vicious and foredoomed to failure.” [44] But nobody is denying that the whole set of Australian systems of marriage is the result of human emotions, intelligence and will. ”

“ Arunta myth sometimes supports, sometimes contradicts, the belief that the totems were originally limited, in each case, to one or other division only, and, being self-contradictory, has no historic value. ”