The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, by Emile Durkheim.

[468] However, there are certain tribes in Queensland where the things thus attributed to a social group are not forbidden for the members of the group: this is notably the case with the Wakelbura. It is to be remembered that in this society, it is the matrimonial classes that serve as the framework of the classification (see above, p. 144). Not only are the men of one class allowed to eat the animals attributed to this class, but they may eat no others. All other food is forbidden them (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 113; Curr, III, p. 27).

But we must not conclude from this that these animals are considered profane. In fact, it should be noticed that the individual not only has the privilege of eating them, but that he is compelled to do so, for he cannot nourish himself otherwise. Now the imperative nature of this rule is a sure sign that we are in the presence of things having a religious nature, only this has given rise to a positive obligation rather than the negative one known as an interdiction. Perhaps it is not quite impossible to see how this deviation came about. We have seen above (p. 140) that every individual is thought to have a sort of property-right over his totem and consequently over the things dependent upon it. Perhaps, under the influence of special circumstances, this aspect of the totemic relation was developed, and they naturally came to believe that only the members of the clan had the right of disposing of their totem and all that is connected with it, and that others, on the contrary, did not have the right of touching it. Under these circumstances, a tribe could nourish itself only on the food attributed to it.

[469] Mrs. Parker uses the expression "multiplex totems."

[470] As examples, see the Euahlayi tribe in Mrs. Parker's book (pp. 15 ff.) and the Wotjobaluk (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 121 ff.; cf. the above-mentioned article of Mathews).

[471] See the examples in Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 122.

[472] See our De quelques formes primitives de classification, p. 28, n. 2.

[473] Strehlow, II, pp. 61-72.

[474] Nat. Tr., p. 112.

[475] See especially Nat. Tr., p. 447, and Nor. Tr., p. 151.

[476] Strehlow, III, pp. xiii-xviii. It sometimes happens that the same secondary totems are attached to two or three principal totems at the same time. This is undoubtedly because Strehlow has not been able to establish with certainty which is the principal totem.

Two interesting facts which appear from this table confirm certain propositions which we had already formulated. First, the principal totems are nearly all animals, with but rare exceptions. Also, stars are always only secondary or associated totems. This is another proof that these latter were only slowly advanced to the rank of totems and that at first the principal totems were preferably chosen from the animal kingdom.

[477] According to the myth, the associate totems served as food to the men of the principal totem in the fabulous times, or, when these are trees, they gave their shade (Strehlow, III, p. xii; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 403). The fact that the associate totems are believed to have been eaten does not imply that they are considered profane; for in the mythical period, the principal totem itself was consumed by the ancestors, the founders of the clan, according to the belief.

[478] Thus in the Wild Cat clan, the designs carved on the churinga represent the Hakea tree, which is a distinct totem to-day (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 147 f.). Strehlow (III, p. xii, n. 4) says that this is frequent.

[479] Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 182; Nat. Tr., pp. 151 and 297.

[480] Nat. Tr., pp. 151 and 158.

[481] Ibid., pp. 448 and 449.

[482] Thus Spencer and Gillen speak of a pigeon called Inturrita, sometimes as a principal totem (Nat. Tr., p. 410), sometimes as an associate totem (ibid., p. 448).

[483] Howitt, Further Notes, pp. 63-64.

[484] Thus it comes about that the clan has frequently been confounded with the tribe. This confusion, which frequently introduces trouble into the writings of ethnologists, has been made especially by Curr (I, pp. 61 ff.).

[485] This is the case especially among the Warramunga (Nor. Tr., p. 298).

[486] See, for example, Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 380 and passim.

[487] One might even ask if tribal totems do not exist sometimes. Thus, among the Arunta, there is an animal, the wild cat, which serves as totem to a particular clan, but which is forbidden for the whole tribe; even the people of other clans can eat it only very moderately (Nat. Tr., p. 168). But we believe that it would be an abuse to speak of a tribal totem in this case, for it does not follow from the fact that the free consumption of an animal is forbidden that this is a totem. Other causes can also give rise to an interdiction. The religious unity of the tribe is undoubtedly real, but this is affirmed with the aid of other symbols. We shall show what these are below (Bk. II, ch. ix).

[488] The totems belong to the tribe in the sense that this is interested as a body in the cult which each clan owes to its totem.

[489] Frazer has made a very complete collection of the texts relative to individual totemism in North America (Totemism and Exogamy, III, pp. 370-456).

[490] For example, among the Hurons, the Iroquois, the Algonquins (Charlevoix, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, VI, pp. 67-70; Sagard, Le grand voyage au pays des Hurons, p. 160), or among the Thompson Indians (Teit, The Thompson Indians of British Columbia, p. 355).

[491] This is the case of the Yuin (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 133), the Kurnai (ibid., p. 135), several tribes of Queensland (Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5, p. 19; Haddon, Head-Hunters, p. 193); among the Delaware (Heckewelder, An Account of the History ... of the Indian Nations, p. 238), among the Thompson Indians (Teit, op. cit., p. 355), and among the Salish Statlumh (Hill Tout, Rep. of the Ethnol. of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV. pp. 147 ff.).

[492] Hill Tout, loc. cit., p. 154.

[493] Catlin, Manners and Customs, etc., London, 1876, I, p. 36.

[494] Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, new edition, VI, pp. 172 ff.

[495] Charlevoix, op. cit., VI, p. 69.

[496] Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 443.

[497] Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 323.

[498] Hill Tout, loc. cit., p. 154.

[499] Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 323.

[500] Miss Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, a Study from the Omaha Tribe (Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, p. 583).—Similar facts will be found in Teit, op. cit., pp. 354, 356; Peter Jones, History of the Ojibway Indians, p. 87.

[501] This is the case, for example, with the dog among the Salish Statlumh, owing to the condition of servitude in which it lives (Hill Tout, loc. cit., p. 153).

[502] Langloh Parker, Euahlayi, p. 21.

[503] "The spirit of a man," says Mrs. Parker (ibid.), "is in his Yuanbeai (his individual totem), and his Yuanbeai is in him."

[504] Langloh Parker, Euahlayi, p. 20. It is the same among certain Salish (Hill Tout, Ethn. Rep. on the Stseelis and Skaulits Tribes, J.A.I., XXXIV, p. 324). The fact is quite general among the Indians of Central America (Brinton, Nagualism, a Study in Native American Folklore and History, in Proceed. of the Am. Philos. Soc., XXXIII, p. 32).

[505] Parker, ibid.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147; Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 443. Frazer has made a collection of the American cases and established the generality of the interdiction (Totemism and Exogamy, III, p. 450). It is true that in America, as we have seen, the individual must kill the animal whose skin serves to make what ethnologists call his medicine-sack. But this usage has been observed in five tribes only; it is probably a late and altered form of the institution.

[506] Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 135, 147, 387; Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 34; Teit, The Shuswap, p. 607.

[507] Meyer, Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, p. 197.

[508] Boas, VIth Rep. on the North-West Tribes of Canada, p. 93; Teit, The Thompson Indians, p. 336; Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 394.

[509] Facts will be found in Hill Tout, Rep. of the Ethnol. of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV, pp. 144, 145. Cf. Langloh Parker, op. cit., p. 29.

[510] According to information given by Howitt in a personal letter to Frazer (Totemism and Exogamy, I, p. 495, and n. 2).

[511] Hill Tout, Ethnol. Rep. on the Stseelis and Skaulits Tribes, J.A.I., XXXIV, p. 324.

[512] Howitt, Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 34; Lafitau, Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains, I, p. 370; Charlevoix, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, VI, p. 68. It is the same with the atai and tamaniu in Mota (Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 250 f.).

[513] Thus the line of demarcation between the animal protectors and fetishes, which Frazer has attempted to establish, does not exist. According to him, fetishism commences when the protector is an individual object and not a class (Totemism, p. 56); but it frequently happens in Australia that a determined animal takes this part (see Howitt, Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 34). The truth is that the ideas of fetish and fetishism do not correspond to any definite thing.

[514] Brinton, Nagualism, in Proceed. Amer. Philos. Soc., XXXIII, p. 32.

[515] Charlevoix, VI, p. 67.

[516] Hill Tout, Rep. on the Ethnol. of the Statlumh of British Columbia, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 142.

[517] Hill Tout, Ethnol. Rep. on the Stseelis and Skaulits Tribes, J.A.I., XXXIV, pp. 311 ff.

[518] Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 133.

[519] Langloh Parker, op. cit., p. 20.

[520] J. W. Powell, An American View of Totemism, in Man, 1902, No. 84; Tylor, ibid., No. 1; Andrew Lang has expressed analogous ideas in Social Origins, pp. 133-135. Also Frazer himself, turning from his former opinion, now thinks that until we are better acquainted with the relations existing between collective totems and "guardian spirits," it would be better to designate them by different names (Totemism and Exogamy, III, p. 456).

[521] This is the case in Australia among the Yuin (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 81), and the Narrinyeri (Meyer, Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, pp. 197 ff.).

[522] "The totem resembles the patron of the individual no more than an escutcheon resembles the image of a saint," says Tylor (op. cit., p. 2). Likewise, if Frazer has taken up the theory of Tylor, it is because he refuses all religious character to the totem of the clan (Totemism and Exogamy, III, p. 452).

[523] See below, chapter ix of this book.

[524] Yet according to one passage in Mathews, the individual totem is hereditary among the Wotjobaluk. "Each individual," he says, "claims some animal, plant or inanimate object as his special and personal totem, which he inherits from his mother" (Journ. and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 291). But it is evident that if all the children in the same family had the personal totem of their mother, neither they nor she would really have personal totems at all. Mathews probably means to say that each individual chooses his individual totem from the list of things attributed to the clan of his mother. In fact, we shall see that each clan has its individual totems which are its exclusive property; the members of the other clans cannot make use of them. In this sense, birth determines the personal totem to a certain extent, but to a certain extent only.

[525] Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania, in Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, I, p. 238.

[526] See Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 507; Catlin, op. cit., I, p. 37; Miss Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, in Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, p. 580; Teit, The Thompson Indians, pp. 317-320; Hill Tout, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 144.

[527] But some examples are found. The Kurnai magicians see their personal totems revealed to them in dreams (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 387; On Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, p. 34). The men of Cape Bedford believe that when an old man dreams of something during the night, this thing is the personal totem of the first person he meets the next day (W. E. Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, p. 19). But it is probable that only supplementary and accessory totems are acquired in this way; for in this same tribe another process is used at the moment of initiation, as we said in the text.

[528] In certain tribes of which Roth speaks (ibid.); also in certain tribes near to Maryborough (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147).

[529] Among the Wiradjuri (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 406; On Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, p. 50).

[530] Roth, loc. cit.

[531] Haddon, Head Hunters, pp. 193 ff.

[532] Among the Wiradjuri (same references as above, n. 4).

[533] In general, it seems as though these transmissions from father to son never take place except when the father is a shaman or a magician. This is also the case among the Thompson Indians (Teit, The Thompson Indians, p. 320) and the Wiradjuri, of whom we just spoke.

[534] Hill Tout (J.A.I., XXXV, pp. 146 f.). The essential rite is the blowing upon the skin: if this were not done correctly, the transmission would not take place. As we shall presently see, the breath is the soul. When both breathe upon the skin of the animal, the magician and the recipient each exhale a part of their souls, which are thus fused, while partaking at the same time of the nature of the animal, who also takes part in the ceremony in the form of its symbol.

[535] N. W. Thomas, Further Remarks on Mr. Hill Tout's Views on Totemism, in Man, 1904, p. 85.

[536] Langloh Parker, op. cit., pp. 20, 29.

[537] Hill Tout, in J.A.I., XXXV, pp. 143 and 146; ibid., XXXIV, p. 324.

[538] Parker, op. cit., p. 30; Teit, The Thompson Indians, p. 320; Hill Tout, in J.A.I., XXXV, p. 144.

[539] Charlevoix, VI, p. 69.

[540] Hill Tout, ibid., p. 145.

[541] Thus at the birth of a child, a tree is planted which is cared for piously; for it is believed that its fate and the child's are united. Frazer, in his Golden Bough, gives a number of customs and beliefs translating this same idea in different ways. (Cf. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, II, pp. 1-55.)

[542] Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 148 ff.; Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 194, 201 ff.; Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 52. Petrie also mentions it in Queensland (Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland, pp. 62 and 118).

[543] Journ. and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 339. Must we see a trace of sexual totemism in the following custom of the Warramunga? When a dead person is buried, a bone of the arm is kept. If it is a woman, the feathers of an emu are added to the bark in which it is wrapped up; if it is a man, the feathers of an owl (Nor. Tr., p. 169).

[544] Some cases are cited where each sexual group has two sexual totems; thus the Wurunjerri unite the sexual totems of the Kurnai (the emu-wren and the linnet) to those of the Wotjobaluk (the bat and the nightjar owl). See Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 150.

[545] Totemism, p. 51.

[546] Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 215.

[547] Threlkeld, quoted by Mathews, loc. cit., p. 339.

[548] Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 148, 151.

[549] Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 200-203; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 149; Petrie, op. cit., p. 62. Among the Kurnai, these bloody battles frequently terminate in marriages of which they are, as it were, a sort of ritual precursor. Sometimes they are merely plays (Petrie, loc. cit.).

[550] On this point, see our study on La Prohibition de l'inceste et ses origines, in the Année Sociologique, I, pp. 44 ff.

[551] However, as we shall presently see (ch. ix), there is a connection between the sexual totems and the great gods.

[552] Primitive Culture, I, p. 402; II, p. 237; Remarks on Totemism, with especial reference to some modern theories concerning it, in J.A.I., XXVIII, and I, New Series, p. 138.

[553] Het Animisme bij den Volken van den indischen Archipel, pp. 69-75.

[554] Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 6.

[555] Tylor, ibid., II, pp. 6-18.

[556] G. McCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, VII. We are acquainted with this work only through an article by Frazer, South African Totemism, published in Man, 1901, No. III.

[557] Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 32 f., and a personal letter by the same author cited by Tylor in J.A.I., XXVIII, p. 147.

[558] This is practically the solution adopted by Wundt (Mythus und Religion, II, p. 269).

[559] It is true that according to Tylor's theory, a clan is only an enlarged family; therefore whatever may be said of one of these groups is, in his theory, applicable to the other (J.A.I., XXVIII, p. 157). But this conception is exceedingly contestable; only the clan presupposes a totem, which has its whole meaning only in and through the clan.

[560] For this same conception, see A. Lang, Social Origins, p. 150.

[561] See above, p. 63.

[562] Primitive Culture, II, p. 17.

[563] Wundt, who has revived the theory of Tylor in its essential lines, has tried to explain this mysterious relationship of the man and the animal in a different way: it was the sight of the corpse in decomposition which suggested the idea. When they saw worms coming out of the body, they thought that the soul was incarnate in them and escaped with them. Worms, and by extension, reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc.), were therefore the first animals to serve as receptacles for the souls of the dead, and consequently they were also the first to be venerated and to play the rôle of totems. It was only subsequently that other animals and plants and even inanimate objects were elevated to the same dignity. But this hypothesis does not have even the shadow of a proof. Wundt affirms (Mythus und Religion, II, p. 296) that reptiles are much more common totems than other animals; from this, he concludes that they are the most primitive. But we cannot see what justifies this assertion, in the support of which the author cites no facts. The lists of totems gathered either in Australia or in America do not show that any special species of animal has played a preponderating rôle. Totems vary from one region to another with the flora and fauna. Moreover, if the circle of possible totems was so closely limited at first, we cannot see how totemism was able to satisfy the fundamental principle which says that the two clans or sub-clans of a tribe must have two different totems.

[564] "Sometimes men adore certain animals," says Tylor, "because they regard them as the reincarnation of the divine souls of the ancestors; this belief is a sort of bridge between the cult rendered to shades and that rendered to animals" (Primitive Culture, II, p. 805, cf. 309, in fine). Likewise, Wundt presents totemism as a section of animalism (II, p. 234).

[565] See above, p. 139.

[566] Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 97 ff.

[567] See above, p. 28.

[568] Jevons recognizes this himself, saying, "It is to be presumed that in the choice of an ally he would prefer ... the kind or species which possessed the greatest power" (p. 101).

[569] 2nd Edition, III, pp. 416 ff.; see especially p. 419, n. 5. In more recent articles, to be analysed below, Frazer exposes a different theory, but one which does not, in his opinion, completely exclude the one in the Golden Bough.

[570] The Origin of the Totemism of the Aborigines of British Columbia, in Proc. and Transact. of the Roy. Soc. of Canada, 2nd series, VII, § 2, pp. 3 ff. Also, Report on the Ethnology of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 141. Hill Tout has replies to various objections made to his theory in Vol. IX of the Transact. of the Roy. Soc. of Canada, pp. 61-99.