of “clan” or “family” gods, and therefore receive honours not paid to the hereditary totems of Australia and North America, which have nothing godlike. It is to be presumed that “totem dances” in which some Australian tribes exhibit, in ballets d'action, the incidents of a myth concerning the totem, are, in a certain sense, “religious”; when they are not magical, and intended to foster and fertilize the species, animal or vegetable or other to which the totem belongs.
The magical performances for the behoof of the totem creatures may be studied in the chapters on “Intichiuma” in Messrs Spencer and Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia, and Native Tribes of Northern Australia. 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. But this opinion has gone the way of other conjectures. The “religious” status of the totem is lowest among peoples where its influence on social regulations is greatest, and vice versa, a topic to which we recur.
There are also various rites, in various tribes, connecting the dead man with his totem at his funeral; perhaps at his initiation, when a boy, into the esoteric knowledge and rules of his tribe. Men may identify themselves with their totems, or, mark themselves as of this or that totem by wearing the hide or the plumage of the bird or beast, or by putting on a mask resembling its face. 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.
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.[1] In other legends, especially those of central and northern Australia, the original totem creatures, animal in form, with bestial aspect, were developed in a marine or lacustrine environment, and from them were evolved the human beings of each totem kin. The rule of non-intermarriage within the totem was, in some myths, of divine institution; in others, was invented by the primitive wandering totemic beings; or was laid down by the wisdom of mere men who saw some unknown evil in con sanguine unions. The strict regard paid to the rule may be called “religious”; in so far as totemists are aware of no secular and social raison d' être of the rule it has a mysterious character. But whereas to eat the totem is sometimes thought to be automatically punished by sickness or death, this danger does not attach to marriage within the totem save in a single known case. The secular penalty alone is dreaded; so there seems to be no religious fear of offending a superior being, or the totem himself: no tabu of a mystic sort.
Social Aspect of the Totem.—The totem has almost always a strong influence on or is associated with marriage law, and except in the centre of Australia, and perhaps in the little-known West, men and women of the same totem may not intermarry, “however far apart their hunting grounds,” and though there is no objection on the score of consanguinity.
This is the result, in Australia, of the custom, there almost universal, which causes each individual to belong, by birth, to one or other of the two main exogamous and intermarrying divisions of the tribe (usually called “phratries”). 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.
In some parts of North America the same rule prevails, with this peculiarity that the phratries, or main exogamous divisions, are not always two, as in Australia, but, for example, among the Mohegans three—Wolf, Turtle, and Turkey.[2] In Wolf all the totems are quadrupeds; under Turtle they are various species of turtles and the yellow eel; and under Turkey all the totems are birds.
Clearly this ranking of the totems in the phratries. is the result of purposeful design, not of accident. Design may also be observed in such phratries of Australian tribes as are named after animals of contrasted colours, such as White Cockatoo and Crow, Light Eagle Hawk and Crow. It has been supposed by Mr J. Mathew, Père Schmidt and others that these Australian phratries arose in an alliance with connubium between a darker and a lighter race.[3] But another hypothesis is not less probable; and as we can translate only about a third of Australian phratry names, conjecture on this subject is premature.
Both in Australia and America the animals, as Eagle Hawk and Crow, which give their names to the phratries, are almost always totem kins within their own phratries.[4]
The Moquis of Arizona are said to have ten phratries, by Captain Ulick Bourke in his Snake Dance of the Moquis, but possibly he did not use the term “phratry” in the sense which we attach to it.
Among the Urabunna of Southern Central Australia, and among the tribes towards the Darling River, a very peculiar rule is said to prevail. There are two phratries, and in each are many totem kins, but each totem kin may intermarry with only one totem kin which must be in the opposite phratry.[5] Thus there are as many exogamous divisions as there are totems in the tribes, which reckon descent in the female line; children inheriting the mother's totem only. Corroboration of these statements is desirable, as the tribes implicated are peculiarly “primitive,” and theirs may be the oldest extant set of marriage rules.
The existence of two or more main exogamous divisions, named or unnamed, is found among peoples where there are either no totem kins, or where they have fallen into the background, as in parts of Melanesia, among the Todas and Meitchis of India and the Wanika in East Africa.[6]
An extraordinary case is reported from South Australia where people must marry in their own phratry, while their children belong to the opposite phratry.[7] This awaits corroboration.
We now see some of the numerous varieties which prevail in the marriage rules connected with the totems. Even among a tribe whose members, it is reported, may marry into their own phratries, it appears that they must not marry within their own totem kins. This is, indeed, the rule wherever totemic societies are found in anything approaching to what we deem their most archaic constitution as in south-east Australia and some tribes of North America.
Exogamy: The Arunta Abnormality.—Meanwhile, in Central Australia, in the Arunta “nation,” the rule forbidding marriage within the totem kin does not exist. Totems here are not, as everywhere else, inherited from either parent, but a child is of what we may call “the local totem” of the place where its mother first became conscious of its life within her. The idea is that the spirits of a primal race, in groups each of one totem only (“Alcheringa folk”), haunt various localities; or spirits (ratapa) emanating from these primal beings do so; they enter into passing married women, and are incarnated and born again.[8]
- ↑ Mrs Langloh Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe.
- ↑ Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 174.
- ↑ Mathew, Eagle Hawk and Crow; Schmidt, Anthropos (1909).
- ↑ See Lang, The Secret of the Totem, pp. 154, 170; and N. W. Thomas, Kinship and Marriage in Australia, pp. 9, 31.
- ↑ Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, pp. 93, 181, 188 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 60, 61, Northern Tribes, p. 71; Lang, Anthropological Essays; Tylor's Festschrift, pp. 203–210.
- ↑ Thomas, ut supra, p. 10. See, for numerous examples, T. G. Frazer, Totemism (1910).
- ↑ MS. of Mrs Bates.
- ↑ It is necessary to state here the sources of our information about the central, north, north-western and south-eastern forms of
