Totemic culture

“ This is a disease like a thickening of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent world, and aiming at the perfection of the man as the end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily life, into means. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Suppression, the Cause of Chronic Diseases
Dr. Senn was right. If men and women lived more naturally, the majority of diseases would disappear.
The primary cause of disease is violation of Nature's Laws. "Civilization" has largely stood for artificiality of life and for unnatural habits. A higher civilization, yet to come, will combine the most exquisite culture of heart and mind with true simplicity and naturalness of living. ”

“ We have arranged for ourselves a life which is against the moral and physical nature of man, and we use all the powers of our mind in order to assure men that this life is the real one. All that we call culture,—our science and arts for improving the delights of life,—all these are only meant to deceive man's natural moral requirements: all that we call hygiene, and the art of healing, are endeavours to deceive the natural physical want of human nature. ”

“ As sure as the means of healing from the apothecary help struggling nature in sickness, or put aside a hindrance to nature's work, just as certainly will the means of culture, which for centuries have been gathered together by science, mitigate and heal moral infirmity, and the outbreak of passion that leads to crime--yes, even crimes that are already committed. ”

“ The first chapter of this book made us acquainted with the conception of totemism. We heard that totemism is a system which takes the place of religion among certain primitive races in Australia, America, and Africa, and furnishes the basis of social organization. We know that in 1869 the Scotchman MacLennan attracted general interest to the phenomena of totemism, which until then had been considered merely as curiosities, by his conjecture that a large number of customs and usages in various old as well as modern societies were to be taken as remnants of a totemic epoch. ”

“ It sounds almost ridiculous to attribute hygienic and eugenic motives such as have hardly yet found consideration in our culture, to these children of the race who lived without thought of the morrow. ”

“ In these cases of purely physical disease, the body [185] reacts on the mind, and the giving way of the will is the first indication of the approach of the malady. It is folly to talk of the will overcoming a disease that has insidiously sapped its foundation. This is not saying that were the wrong conditions of living righted, and the taints of heredity eliminated, the power of the will would not be able to maintain the body against all succeeding influences. But to reach that perfect state will require many generations of rightly directed culture. ”

“ It appeared worth while to describe diseases which are propagated on the beams of light—on the wings of thought; which convulse the mind by the excitement of the senses, and wonderfully affect the nerves, the media of its will and of its feelings. It seemed worth while to attempt to place these disorders between the epidemics of a less refined origin, which affect the body more than the soul, and all those passions and emotions which border on the vast domain of disease, ready at every moment to pass the boundary. ”

“ And because there’s no end in looking after your body, people who care about their body with use of medicine, not only forget about lives of other people’s, but also of their own. Devil of culture explained that he inspires people that utilizing all those deeds which run devils of technical improvements, division of labor, communications, printing, art, and medicine, is a kind of virtue and that the persons enjoying all these may be quite pleased with themselves and don’t not need to try to be better. ”

“ These different facts give us an idea of the considerable place held by the totem in the social life of the primitives. However, up to the present, it has appeared to us as something relatively outside of the man, for it is only upon external things that we have seen it represented. But totemic images are not placed only upon the walls of their houses, the sides of their canoes, their arms, their utensils and their tombs; they are also found on the bodies of the men. ”

“ The frightful plagues that swept away millions of men in the Middle Ages were only fought with prayer, processions, and other superstitious devices, instead of with rational hygienic and sanitary measures. We have only gradually learned to discard this superstition. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that a sound knowledge of the physiological functions and environment of the organism induced people once more to have a concern for bodily culture. ”

“ The Renaissance was a re-birth of other things besides a taste for round limbs and the science of representing them; we begin to hear again of two diseases, endemic in imperial Rome, from which a lively and vigorous society keeps itself tolerably free—Rarity-hunting and Expertise. These parasites can get no hold on a healthy body; it is on dead and dying matter that they batten and grow fat. The passion to possess what is scarce, and nothing else, is a disease that develops as civilisation grows old and dogs it to the grave: it is saprophytic. ”

“ This impatience upon which all outside influences seem to exert an exciting and even exasperating effect, is called by some nervousness, by others pessimism, and by a third class, skepticism. The multiplicity of names describes but one and the same disease. This disease is visible in every manifestation of modern culture. Literature and art, philosophy and positive knowledge, politics and economy, all are infected by its taint. ”

“ It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a fetish, to glance at a curious group of nations which connect a disease at once with spiritual influence, and with the presence of some material object. They are a set of illustrations of the savage principle, that a disease or an actual disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or such-like material object. ”

“ Now an agricultural, metallurgic people, with male descent, in the middle barbarism, will explain its survivals of totemism by a myth natural in its intellectual and social condition; but not natural in the condition of the homeless nomad hunters, among whom totemism arose. For example, we have no reason to suspect that when totemism began men had a highly developed religion of ancestor-worship. ”

“ Mortals obtain the harmony of health, only as they forsake discord, acknowledge the supremacy of Mind, Unconscious thought-evil. and abandon their material beliefs. Eradicate the image of disease from the perturbed thought, before it has taken tangible shape in conscious thought, alias the body, and you prevent its development and heredity. This task becomes easy, if you understand that every disease is an error, and has no character or type, except what mortal mind assigns to it. By lifting the mind above error, or disease, and contending persistently against it, you destroy it. ”

“ In general its prevalence appears to have been in inverse proportion to that of totemism—it is lacking or feeble in the chief totemic centers, Australia and North America, and strongest in Polynesia, where totemism is hardly recognizable. It may be said that, while totemism appears in those forms of social life that have been created by hunting communities,1045 taboo is the product of more settled societies, in which agriculture plays an important part. ”

“ After centuries devoted by the faculty to a futile and arrogant attempt to counteract the disturbances of health, which we call diseases, in the stereotyped manner known as "orthodox;" after endless complications, infinite "specializing"—in itself a futility—and unblushing complicity with the powers that be, we find them now at length, baffled, discredited, but unashamed, cast back, discomforted, upon Mother Nature's kindly breast, their victims humbly seeking healing in simple unity from her ample store. ”

“ Should the same industry and ingenuity, which have produced these triumphs of medicine over diseases and death, be applied to the moral science, it is highly probable, that most of those baneful vices, which deform the human breast, and convulse the nations of the earth, might be banished from the world. ”

“ Finally, the totemic fetish is always associated in totemic regions with animal and plant totems, and is also closely connected with the idea, even here permeating totemic belief, that there were anthropomorphic ancestors who left these fetishes as magic-working legacies. Thus, totemism passes over, on the one hand, into ancestor-worship, and, on the other, into fetishism, with which it combines, particularly in the 'Intichiuma' festivals, to form a composite cult. Tribal totemism is the source of the individual totem ”

“ The old struggle against the forces of nature [Pg 9] once relaxed, men grew effeminate and women weak; diseases increased; physical fibre softened and atrophied and withered away; moral fibre went the same path to destruction; dry rot attacked the foundations of society, and eventually the whole fabric toppled over, or was swept aside, to be built up again by some conquering horde of barbarians, which in its turn grew civilized, and in its turn succumbed to the virulent poison that seemed inherent in the very nature of civilization, and for which there seemed to be no antidote. ”

“ If the principle be a true one, that physical disorder comes from mental,—that disease is derived originally from evil, then would not such universal prevalence of certain diseases prove the existence of certain general forms of hereditary evil, deeply fixed in the heart of common humanity at the present day? ”

“ Ere the ground could be cleared for the new palace of physical science which the glorious sixteenth century was to rear, scepticism must lend its withering and desolating aid; foul undergrowths must be destroyed; evil germs, bred of the stagnant marshes of the dark ages, must perish under the wholesome, if ruthless, disinfectants of reason and unbelief. There was a stern need of this. The demon theory of disease had lasted from primeval ages up to this dawn of the sixteenth century. ”

“ It’s just like a bacteriologist’s culture—I didn’t intend the pun—when it gets to the right temperature and consistency for supporting a colony of germs. Similarly, our culture suddenly spawns a horde of demons. And, like germs, they have a peculiar affinity to our culture. ”

“ The primitive theory of disease and death is so widespread that we may accept it as the belief of mankind before custom gave place to scientific inquiry. The primitive argument was this: the natural state of man is to be healthy, and everything contrary to Nature must be the doing of some hostile agency. ”

“ Meantime, the disease, instead of passing away, changes its form, sinks deeper into the flesh, the blood, the bones. The disease is this: that men born good and gentle, men with love and mercy rooted in their hearts, perpetrate such atrocities on one another, themselves not knowing why or wherefore. ”

“ Morgan's great work, and not his attempt, his futile attempt as I think, to apply the principles of totemic society to the elucidation of societies that have long passed the stage of totemism. In particular, the great European civilisations are not totemic, nor are they to be seen passing from totemism. It is true that Mr. Lang, Mr. Grant Allen, and others have attempted to trace in certain features of Greek ritual and belief, and in certain tribal formations discoverable in Anglo-Saxon Britain, the relics of a living totemism in the civilised races of Europe ”

“ This “higher region,” from which such injurious influences originate, causing the growth of miasmas and microbes, is the “astral plane,” or the soul of the world, and as the evil states in the soul of the world are caused by the evil states of the human mind, it becomes comprehensible how epidemic diseases, pestilence and plague, no less than wars, are the ultimate results of disharmonies and depraved spiritual states in the soul of humanity. ”

“ Although today the Old-World races have acquired considerable immunity to that affliction and although science has discovered a rational and comparatively successful treatment, it is still the greatest single degenerative influence with which the race has to contend. Its evil potency is greatly enhanced by the facility with which it weds alcoholism, and breeds tuberculosis, cancer, and paranoia. ”

“ Quack teachers, healers, and authors are flooding the community with their mental mixtures and mistakes, brazenly calling them Metaphysics and Christian Science. Unscientific theory and wrong mental practice are more fatal to sanitary reform, sound morals, health, and longevity than aught else can be,— even more so than the old-fashioned empirical treatment, by blood-letting, poisonous drugs, and the other multifarious modes of frightening people to death. ”

“ But there are other hereditary diseases and degeneracies of every kind, not only of the brain, but of the whole body, such as the disposition to tuberculosis, rickets, short-sightedness, and diseases of the blood, all of which are related to sexual life and morals, because they are all more or less injurious to the individual and to society. ”