Andrew Lang

“ But why, on our system, can the Piraungaru custom break the rule of individual marriage more easily than the law prohibiting incest? Why it can do so on the theory of pristine promiscuity we have explained (p. 41, supra) .
We reply that individual marriage has not, among savages, any "religious" sanction; it is protected by no form of the phratry or totem tabu; by no god, such as Hymen; but rests, as from the first it rested, on the character and strength of the possessor of the woman or women, and falls into abeyance if he does not choose to exert it. ”

“ The idea of such a change of partners is human, not animal, and the more of a brute the ancestor of man was the less could he dream, in times truly primitive, of Piraungaru as a permanent arrangement. Men, in a few tribes, declined into it, and are capable of passing out of it, like the Urabunna or Dieri man, who either retains so much of the animal, or is rising so far towards the Homeric standard, as to fight rather than let his wife be allotted to another man, or at least to thump that other man afterwards. ”

“ Human history does not show us a relatively large mass segregating itself into smaller communities. It shows us small communities aggregating into larger combinations, the village into the city, the European tribes into the kingdom, the kingdoms into the nation, the nation into the empire. The Tribe itself, in savage society, is a combination of small kins, or sets of persons of various degrees of status; these kins have not been legislatively segregated out of a pre-existing horde having powers of legislation. ”

“ Durkheim here introduces a theory of Arunta totemic magic. As he justly says, the co-operative principle—each group in a tribe doing magic for the good of all the other groups—cannot be primitive. The object of the magic, he thinks, was to maintain in good condition the totems, which are the gods, of the groups, and, indeed, "the condition of their existence." Later, ideas altered, ancestral souls, reincarnated, were the source of life, but the totemic magic survived with a new purpose, as Magical Co-operative Stores. But why have the more primitive tribes no totem magic? ”

“ It is no conjecture that blood is held sacred, especially kindred blood, and that this belief involves exogamy, "No marriage within the blood of the man and the totem." We give reasons for everything, whereas, if a reformatory bisection of a promiscuous horde were made, by an inspired wizard, why did he do it, and why should each moiety take an animal name? Again, if there were no recognised pre-existing connection between human groups and animals, why should one group do magic for one animal, rather than for another, in cases where they do this magic? ”

“ Hill-Tout overlooks.
That the natives in some myths regard the man as founder of a totem kin under female descent proves nothing at all. Does the Tsimshian Bear myth prove that the natives themselves turn into Bears, and become men again? Does it even prove that such an occurrence, to-day, would now seem normal to them? Nothing is proved, except that in myth-making the natives think that this metamorphosis may have occurred in the past. In the same way—when myth-making—they think that a man might convey his badge to his sisters, to be hereditary in the female line. ”

“ Baldwin Spencer, we have tried to show that human groups would not work magic each for a separate animal, unless they already believed in a connection of a mystic or peculiarly intimate kind between themselves and their animal. Whether late or early in evolution, the Arunta totem magic can only rest on the belief in a specially close and mystical rapport between the totem animal or plant, and the human beings of the same name. ”

“ These south-eastern tribes, far more primitive than the Arunta in their ceremonials, and in their social organisation, do not entertain that dominant factor in Aruntadom, the belief in the perpetual reincarnation of the souls of the mythical ancestors of the Alcheringa. That belief is a philosophy far from primitive. As each child is, in Arunta opinion, a being who has existed from the beginning of things, he is not, he cannot be, a creature of man's begetting. ”

“ Otto Siebert, a missionary among the Dieri, praises Pirrauru for "its earnestness in regard to morality." One does not quite see that hiring out one's paramours, who are other men's wives, to a third set of men is earnestly moral, or that jealousy, checked by strangling in public, by hot coals in private, is edifying, but Pirrauru is not "group marriage." No pre-existing group is involved. Pirrauru may (if they like jealousy and hot coals) live together in a group, or the men and women may often live far remote from each other, and meet only at bean-feasts. ”

“ It is difficult to understand how a fact so obvious as this—that the community of name, if it existed, and if its origin were unknown, would come to be taken by the groups as implying a mystic connection between all who bore it, men or beasts—can have escaped the notice of any one who is acquainted with the nature of savage thinking, and with its survivals into civilised ritual and magic. ”

“ If a man does transmit his animal protector, his descendants, lineal or collateral, may become exogamous, on the theory, by making other kins treaties of intermarriage to secure political alliances; or they may not, just as taste or chance direct. All the while, every "totem" of every sort, hereditary or not, is, on this theory, a guardian spirit. That spiritual entity is the essence of totemism, exogamy is an accident—according to Mr. Hill-Tout. ”

“ The Piraungaru custom does not prove that earliest man was not ferociously jealous; it merely shows that certain tribes have reached a stage in which jealousy is, at present, more or less suppressed in favour of legalised license.
We catch the Urabunna and Dieri at a moment of development in which the abandonment of strict possession of a wife is compensated for by a legalised system of changing partners, enduring after the feast of license is over. But even so, a man is responsible, as father, for the children of his actual wife, not for the children of his Piraungaru paramours. ”

“ One totem kin is merely called "The Men" (Kati) , the name which, in dozens of cases, a tribe gives to itself. Another totem kin is called "The Laughing Boys" (Thaballa) , a name which is obviously a nickname, and not given from within. The Thaballa have found it necessary to evolve a myth about descent from a giggling boy and his giggling playmates, and to practise magic for their behoof, as they are supposed not to be dead. All this has clearly been done by the Laughing Boy totem kin merely to keep themselves in line with other totem kins named from lower animal form. ”

“ In no tribe with female descent can a district have its local totem, as among the Arunta. A district can only have a local totem if the majority of the living people, and of the haunting ghosts of the dead, are of one totem only. But this (setting aside the occasional results of an isolated Urabunna superstition) can only occur under male reckoning of descent, which confessedly is not primitive. In a region where reckoning in the female line exists a woman could not say, "I conceived my child in Grub district, the country of totem Grub"—for such a country there is not and cannot be. ”

“ By this time all females of phratry A might not only marry any man of phratry B, but were, according to the hypothesis, by theory and by practice, all wives of all men of phratry B. Next, as to-day, a man of B married a woman of A, with or without the existing offensive rites, but his tenure of her is still so insecure and recent that it is set aside, to a great extent, by the Piraungaru or Pirauru custom, itself a proof and survival of "group marriage," and of communal promiscuity in the past. ”

“ Now when the Arunta "ignore the tie of blood on the maternal side," they prove too much. They ignore that of which they are not ignorant. Not being idiots, they are well aware of the maternal tie of blood; but they do not permit it to affect the descent of the totem, which is regulated by their isolated superstition, the doctrine of reincarnation combined with the churinga nanja belief. Nor do they ignore fatherhood, as we saw, in affairs of inheritance of local office and totemic rites. ”

“ In trying to construct a more satisfactory system than those which have been criticised, we must commence, like others, with an hypothesis as to what kind of social animal man was when he began his career. Now we really are not quite reduced to conjecture, for Mr. Howitt's knowledge of savage life, in such a country as Australia, proves that the economic conditions, the search for supplies, and the blunt inefficiency of the earliest weapons, instruments, and hunting methods must have forced men to live in small separate groups. ”

“ On such a view it is perfectly natural that a man, deeming himself one of his totem species, should regard it with respect and affection, and that he should imagine himself possessed of a power, such as men of other totems do not possess, to increase or diminish it, according to circumstances, for the good of himself and his fellows. Thus the practice of Intichiuma, that is, magical ceremonies, performed by men of a totem for its increase or diminution, would be a natural development of the original germ or stock of totemism. ”

“ One woman may, on different occasions, be allotted as Piraungaru to different men, one man to different women. Occasionally, though rarely, the regular husband (he who marries the wife by filthy "rites") resists the allotting of his wife to another man, and then "there is a fight."
The question is, does this Urabunna custom of Piraungaru (the existence of which in some tribes is not denied) represent a survival of a primary stage in which all men of a certain social and phratriac status were all alike husbands to all women of the corresponding status (group, or rather status, marriage) ”

“ There is no communal horde in either of Mr. Darwin's conjectures, and the males of these "families" were all exogamous in practice, all compelled to mate out of the group of consanguinity, except in the case of the sire, or male head, who, of course, could mate with his own daughters.
Were I forced to conjecture, I should adopt Mr. Darwin's second hypothesis (b) because, given man so jealous, and in a brutal state so very low as that postulated, he could not hope "jealously to guard his women from all other men," if he lived in a community with other men. ”

“ The natives have merely hit on my own conjecture, as to the remote germ of totemic names, and applied it where the process never occurs. The Tsimshians, in the same way, are familiar with the adoption of protective animals by male individuals. They are also familiar with the descent of the kin-totem through females. Like the famous writer on Chinese Metaphysics, the Tsimshians "combine their information." A man, they say, became a bear, and became a man again. ”

“ No man or woman may marry a person of his or her own totem. But this, in fact, as matters stand in Australia, puts no fresh bar on marriage, because (except in four or five tribes of the Centre) if a man marries out of his phratry he must necessarily marry out of his totem kin, since there are no members of his totem name in the phratry into which he must marry. In America, in cases where there are no phratries, and universally, where totems exist without phratries, marriage between persons of the same totem is forbidden. ”

“ It is waste of time to seek for the origin of totemism in anything—an animal name, a sacred animal, a paternal soul tenanting an animal—which is inherited from its first owner, he being an individual ancestor male. Such inheritance implies the existence of reckoning descent in the male line, and totemism conspicuously began in, and is least contaminated in, tribes who reckon descent in the female line. ”

“ A group may not have understood the facts of reproduction and procreation (as the Arunta are said not to understand them) , [22] but the facts of blood connection, and of the relation of the blood to the life, could escape no human beings. [23] As savages undeniably do not draw the line between beasts and other things on one side, and men on the other, as we do, it was natural for them to suppose that the animal bearing the group name, and therefore solidaire with the group, was united with it, as the members of the group themselves were visibly united, namely, by the blood bond. ”

“ Where totems are exogamous, or where totems and matrimonial classes exist, the phratry is now an empty survival; having done its work it does no more work, and often vanishes. If members of local animal-named groups, become fully totemic, had at once understood their own position as under the now existing totem law, they could have taken wives of different totems of descent each in their own group, without any phratries at all. ”

“ A man who does not inherit his father's totem because of the accident of his conception in a local centre of another totem, does, none the less, inherit his totemic ceremonies and rites. Totemism is thus en pleine décadence among the Arunta, from whom, consequently, nothing can be learned as to the origin of totemism. ”

“ When a child is born, its friends hunt for its ancestral stone amulet in the place where its mother thinks that she conceived it, and around the nearest rendezvous of discarnate local totemic souls, all of one totem only. ”

“ He says, "To adopt or receive the name of an animal or plant, or other object, was, in the mind of the savage, to be endowed with the essence or spirit of that object, to be under its protection, to become one with it in a very special and mysterious sense." ”

“ The totem of the most powerful local group in a tribe having descent through males, appears to have become the Siboko of the whole tribe, while the other totems have died out. It is not probable that a nickname of remembered origin, given in recent times to a tribe of relatively advanced civilisation, should, as the myth asserts, not only have become a name of honour, but should have founded tribal animal-worship. ”