[689] Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 50, 103, 120. It is also generally thought that in the Polynesian languages, the word mana primitively had the sense of authority (see Tregear, Maori Comparative Dictionary, s.v.).

[690] See Albert Mathiez, Les origines des cultes révolutionnaires (1789-1792).

[691] Ibid., p. 24.

[692] Ibid., pp. 29, 32.

[693] Ibid., p. 30.

[694] Ibid., p. 46.

[695] See Mathiez, La Théophilanthropie et la Culte décadaire, p. 36.

[696] See Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 33.

[697] There are even ceremonies, for example, those which take place in connection with the initiation, to which members of foreign tribes are invited. A whole system of messages and messengers is organized for these convocations, without which the great solemnities could not take place (see Howitt, Notes on Australian Message-Sticks and Messengers, in J.A.I., 1889; Nat. Tr., pp. 83, 678-691; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 159; Nor. Tr., p. 551).

[698] The corrobbori is distinguished from the real religious ceremonies by the fact that it is open to women and uninitiated persons. But if these two sorts of collective manifestations are to be distinguished, they are, none the less, closely related. We shall have occasion elsewhere to come back to this relationship and to explain it.

[699] Except, of course, in the case of the great bush-beating hunts.

[700] "The peaceful monotony of this part of his life," say Spencer and Gillen (Nor. Tr., p. 33).

[701] Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 683. He is speaking of the demonstrations which take place when an ambassador sent to a group of foreigners returns to camp with news of a favourable result. Cf. Brough Smyth, I, p. 138; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 222.

[702] See Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 96 f.; Nor. Tr., p. 137; Brough Smyth, II, p. 319.—This ritual promiscuity is found especially in the initiation ceremonies (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 267, 381; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 657), and in the totemic ceremonies (Nor. Tr., pp. 214, 298, 237). In these latter, the ordinary exogamic rules are violated. Sometimes among the Arunta, unions between father and daughter, mother and son, and brothers and sisters (that is in every case, relationship by blood) remain forbidden (Nat. Tr., pp. 96 f.).

[703] Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 535, 545. This is extremely common.

[704] These women were Kingilli themselves, so these unions violated the exogamic rules.

[705] Nor. Tr., p. 237.

[706] Nor. Tr., p. 391. Other examples of this collective effervescence during the religious ceremonies will be found in Nat. Tr., pp. 244-246, 365-366, 374, 509-510 (this latter in connection with a funeral rite). Cf. Nor. Tr., pp. 213, 351.

[707] Thus we see that this fraternity is the logical consequence of totemism, rather than its basis. Men have not imagined their duties towards the animals of the totemic species because they regarded them as kindred, but have imagined the kinship to explain the nature of the beliefs and rites of which they were the object. The animal was considered a relative of the man because it was a sacred being like the man, but it was not treated as a sacred being because it was regarded as a relative.

[708] See below, Bk. III, ch i, § 3.

[709] At the bottom of this conception there is a well-founded and persistent sentiment. Modern science also tends more and more to admit that the duality of man and nature does not exclude their unity, and that physical and moral forces, though distinct, are closely related. We undoubtedly have a different conception of this unity and relationship than the primitive, but beneath these different symbols, the truth affirmed by the two is the same.

[710] We say that this derivation is sometimes indirect on account of the industrial methods which, in a large number of cases, seem to be derived from religion through the intermediacy of magic (see Hubert and Mauss, Théorie générale de la Magie, Année Sociol., VII, pp. 144 ff.); for, as we believe, magic forces are only a special form of religious forces. We shall have occasion to return to this point several times.

[711] At least after he is once adult and fully initiated, for the initiation rites, introducing the young man to the social life, are a severe discipline in themselves.

[712] Upon this particular aspect of primitive societies, see our Division du travail social, 3rd ed., pp. 123, 149, 173 ff.

[713] We provisionally limit ourselves to this general indication: we shall return to this idea and give more explicit proof, when we speak of the rites (Bk. III).

[714] On this point, see Achelis, Die Ekstase, Berlin, 1902, especially ch. i.

[715] Cf. Mauss, Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés eskimos, in Année Sociol., IX, p. 127.

[716] Thus we see how erroneous those theories are which, like the geographical materialism of Ratzel (see especially his Politische Geographie), seek to derive all social life from its material foundation (either economic or territorial). They commit an error precisely similar to the one committed by Maudsley in individual psychology. Just as this latter reduced all the psychical life of the individual to a mere epiphenomenon of his physiological basis, they seek to reduce the whole psychical life of the group to its physical basis. But they forget that ideas are realities and forces, and that collective representations are forces even more powerful and active than individual representations. On this point, see our Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives, in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, May, 1898.

[717] See above, pp. 188 and 194.

[718] Even the excreta have a religious character. See Preuss, Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst, especially ch. ii, entitled Der Zauber der Defäkation (Globus, LXXXVI, pp. 325 ff.).

[719] This principle has passed from religion into magic: it is the totem ex parte of the alchemists.

[720] On this point see Règles de la méthode sociologique, pp. 5 ff.

[721] Procopius of Gaza, Commentarii in Isaiam, 496.

[722] See Thévenot, Voyage au Levant, Paris, 1689, p. 638. The fact was still round in 1862.

[723] Lacassagne, Les Tatouages, p. 10.

[724] Lombroso, L'homme criminel, I, p. 292.

[725] Lombroso, ibid., I, pp. 268, 285, 291 f.; Lacassagne, op. cit., p. 97.

[726] See above, p. 127.

[727] For the authority of the chiefs, see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 10; Nor. Tr., p. 25; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 295 ff.

[728] At least in Australia. In America, the population is more generally sedentary; but the American clan represents a relatively advanced form of organization.

[729] To make sure of this, it is sufficient to look at the chart arranged by Thomas, Kinship and Marriage in Australia, p. 40. To appreciate this chart properly, it should be remembered that the author has extended, for a reason unknown to us, the system of totemic filiation in the paternal line clear to the western coast of Australia, though we have almost no information about the tribes of this region, which is, moreover, largely a desert.

[730] The stars are often regarded, even by the Australians, as the land of souls and mythical personages, as will be established in the next chapter: that means that they pass as being a very different world from that of the living.

[731] Op. cit., I, p. 4. Cf. Schulze, loc. cit., p. 243.

[732] Of course it is to be understood that, as we have already pointed out (see above, p. 155), this choice was not made without a more or less formal agreement between the groups that each should take a different emblem from its neighbours.

[733] The mental state studied in this paragraph is identical to the one called by Lévy-Bruhl the law of participation (Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, pp. 76 ff.). The following pages were written when this work appeared and we publish them without change; we confine ourselves to adding certain explanations showing in what we differ from M. Lévy-Bruhl in our understanding of the facts.

[734] See above, p. 230.

[735] Another cause has contributed much to this fusion; this is the extreme contagiousness of religious forces. They seize upon every object within their reach, whatever it may be. Thus a single religious force may animate the most diverse things which, by that very fact, become closely connected and classified within a single group. We shall return again to this contagiousness, when we shall show that it comes from the social origins of the idea of sacredness (Bk. III, ch. i, in fine).

[736] Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit., pp. 77 ff.

[737] Ibid., p. 79.

[738] See above, p. 146.

[739] This is the case with the Gnanji; see Nor. Tr., pp. 170, 546; cf. a similar case in Brough Smyth, II, p. 269.

[740] Australian Aborigines, p. 51.

[741] There certainly was a time when the Gnanji women had souls, for a large number of women's souls still exist to-day. However, they never reincarnate themselves; since in this tribe the soul animating a new-born child is an old reincarnated soul, it follows from the fact that women's souls do not reincarnate themselves, that women cannot have a soul. Moreover, it is possible to explain whence this absence of reincarnation comes. Filiation among the Gnanji, after having been uterine, is now in the paternal line: a mother no longer transmits her totem to her child. So the woman no longer has any descendants to perpetuate her; she is the finis familiæ suæ. To explain this situation, there are only two possible hypotheses; either women have no souls, or else they are destroyed after death. The Gnanji have adopted the former of these two explanations; certain peoples of Queensland have preferred the latter (see Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, in N. Queensland Ethnog., No. 5, § 68).

[742] "The children below four or five years of age have neither soul nor future life," says Dawson. But the fact he thus relates is merely the absence of funeral rites for young children. We shall see the real meaning of this below.

[743] Dawson, p. 51; Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 35; Eylmann, p. 188.

[744] Nor. Tr., p. 542; Schürmann, The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 235.

[745] This is the expression used by Dawson, p. 50.

[746] Strehlow, I, p. 15, n. 1; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 246; this is the theme of the myth of the vampire.

[747] Strehlow, I, p. 15; Schulze, p. 244; Dawson, p. 51. It is true that it is sometimes said that souls have nothing corporeal; according to certain testimony collected by Eylmann (p. 188), they are ohne Fleisch und Blut. But these radical negations leave us sceptical. The fact that offerings are not made to the souls of the dead in no way implies, as Roth thinks (Superstition, Magic, etc., § 65), that they do not eat.

[748] Roth, ibid., § 65; Nor. Tr., p. 530. It sometimes happens that the soul emits odours (Roth, ibid., § 68).

[749] Roth, ibid., § 67; Dawson, p. 51.

[750] Roth, ibid., § 65.

[751] Schürmann, Aborig. Tr. of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 235.

[752] Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 29, 35; Roth, ibid., §§ 65, 67, 68.

[753] Roth, ibid., § 65; Strehlow, I, p. 15.

[754] Strehlow, I, p. 14, n. 1.

[755] Frazer, On Certain Burial Customs, as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul, in J.A.I., XV, p. 66.

[756] This is the case with the Kaitish and the Unmatjera; see Nor. Tr., p. 506; and Nat. Tr., p. 512.

[757] Roth, ibid., §§ 65, 66, 67, 68.

[758] Roth, ibid., § 68; this says that when someone faints after a loss of blood, it is because the soul is gone. Cf. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 38.

[759] Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 29, 35; Roth, ibid., § 65.

[760] Strehlow, I, pp. 12, 14. In these passages he speaks of evil spirits which kill little children and eat their souls, livers and fat, or else their souls, livers and kidneys. The fact that the soul is thus put on the same plane as the different viscera and tissues and is made a food like them shows the close connection it has with them. Cf. Schulze, p. 245.

[761] For example, among the peoples on the Pennefather River (Roth, ibid., § 68), there is a name for the soul residing in the heart (Ngai), another for the one in the placenta (Cho-i), and a third for the one which is confounded with the breath (Wanji). Among the Euahlayi, there are three or even four souls (Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 35).

[762] See the description of the Urpmilchima rite among the Arunta (Nat. Tr., pp. 503 ff.).

[763] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 497 and 508.

[764] Nor. Tr., pp. 547, 548.

[765] Ibid., pp. 506, 527 ff.

[766] Meyer, The Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, p. 198.

[767] Nor. Tr., pp. 551, 463; Nat. Tr., p. 553.

[768] Nor. Tr., p. 540.

[769] Among the Arunta and Loritja, for example (Strehlow, I, p. 15, n. 2; II, p. 77). During life, the soul is called gumna, and ltana after death. The ltana of Strehlow is identical with the ulthana of Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., pp. 514 ff.). The same is true of the tribes on the Bloomfield River (Roth, Superstition, etc., §66).

[770] Eylmann, p. 188.

[771] Nat. Tr., pp. 524, 491, 496.

[772] Nor. Tr., pp. 542, 504.

[773] Mathews, Ethnol. Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, in Journal and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 287.

[774] Strehlow, I, pp. 15 ff. Thus, according to Strehlow, the dead live in an island in the Arunta theory, but according to Spencer and Gillen, in a subterranean place. It is probable that the two myths coexist and are not the only ones. We shall see that even a third has been found. On this conception of an island of the dead, see Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 498; Schürmann, Aborig. Tr. of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 235; Eylmann, p. 189.

[775] Schulze, p. 244.

[776] Dawson, p. 51.

[777] In these same tribes evident traces of a more ancient myth will be found, according to which the dead live in a subterranean place (Dawson, ibid.).

[778] Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 18 f.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 473; Strehlow, I, p. 16.

[779] Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 498.

[780] Strehlow, I, p. 16; Eylmann, p. 189; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 473.

[781] These are the spirits of the ancestors of a special clan, the clan of a certain poisonous gland (Giftdrüsenmänner).

[782] Sometimes the work of the missionaries is evident. Dawson speaks of a real hell opposed to paradise; but he too tends to regard this as a European importation.

[783] Dorsey, XIth Rep., pp. 419-420, 422, 485. Cf. Marillier, La survivance de l'âme et l'idée de justice chez les peuples non-civilisés, Rapport de l'Ecole des Hautes Études, 1893.

[784] They may be doubled temporarily, as we shall see in the next chapter: but these duplications add nothing to the number of the souls capable of reincarnation.

[785] Strehlow, I, p. 2.

[786] Nat. Tr., p. 73, n. 1

[787] On this set of conceptions, see Nat. Tr., pp. 119, 123-127, 387 ff.; Nor. Tr., pp. 145-174. Among the Gnanji, it is not necessarily near the oknanikilla that the conception takes place. But they believe that each couple is accompanied in its wanderings over the continent by a swarm of souls of the husband's totem. When the time comes, one of these souls enters the body of the wife and fertilizes it, wherever she may be (Nor. Tr., p. 169).

[788] Nat. Tr., pp. 512 f.; cf. ch. x and xi.

[789] Nat. Tr., p. 119.

[790] Among the Kaitish (Nor. Tr., p. 154) and the Urabunna (Nor. Tr., p. 146).

[791] This is the case among the Warramunga and the related tribes, the Walpari, Wulmala, Worgaia, Tjingilli (Nor. Tr., p. 161), and also the Umbaia and the Gnanji (ibid., p. 170).

[792] Strehlow, I, pp. 15-16. For the Loritja, see Strehlow, p. 7.

[793] Strehlow even goes so far as to say that sexual relations are not even thought to be a necessary condition or sort of preparation for conception (II, p. 52, n. 7). It is true that he adds a few lines below that the old men know perfectly well the connection which unites sexual intercourse and generation, and that as far as animals are concerned, the children themselves know it. This lessens the value of his first assertion a little.

[794] In general, we employ the terminology of Spencer and Gillen rather than that of Strehlow because it is now consecrated by long usage.

[795] Nat. Tr., pp. 124, 513.

[796] I, p. 5. Ngarra means eternal, according to Strehlow. Among the Loritja, only rocks fulfil this function.

[797] Strehlow translates it by Kinderkeime (children-germs). It is not true that Spencer and Gillen have ignored the myth of the ratapa and the customs connected with it. They explicitly mention it in Nat. Tr., pp. 336 ff. and 552. They noticed, at different points of the Arunta territory, the existence of rocks called Erathipa from which the spirit children, or the children's souls, disengage themselves, to enter the bodies of women and fertilize them. According to Spencer and Gillen, Erathipa means child, though, as they add, it is rarely used in this sense in ordinary conversation (ibid., p. 338).

[798] The Arunta are divided into four or eight matrimonial classes. The class of a child is determined by that of his father; inversely, that of the latter may be deduced from the former (see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 70 ff.; Strehlow, I, pp. 6 ff.). It remains to be seen how the ratapa has a matrimonial class; we shall return to this point again.

[799] Strehlow, II, p. 52. It happens sometimes, though rarely, that disputes arise over the nature of the child's totem. Strehlow cites such a case (II, p. 53).

[800] This is the same word as the namatwinna found in Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., p. 541).

[801] Strehlow, II, p. 53.

[802] Strehlow, II, p. 56.

[803] Mathews attributes a similar theory of conception to the Tjingilli (alias Chingalee) (Proc. Roy. Geogr. Trans. and Soc. Queensland, XXII (1907), pp. 75-76).

[804] It sometimes happens that the ancestor who is believed to have thrown the namatuna shows himself to the woman in the form of an animal or a man; this is one more proof of the affinity of the ancestral soul for a material form.

[805] Schulze, loc. cit., p. 237.

[806] This results from the fact that the ratapa can incarnate itself only in the body of a woman belonging to the same matrimonial class as the mother of the mythical ancestor. So we cannot understand how Strehlow could say (I, p. 42, Anmerkung) that, except in one case, the myths do not attribute determined matrimonial classes to the Alcheringa ancestors. His own theory of conception proves the contrary (cf. II, pp. 53 ff.).

[807] Strehlow, II, p. 58.

[808] The difference between the two versions becomes still smaller and is reduced to almost nothing, if we observe that, when Spencer and Gillen tell us that the ancestral soul is incarnated in the woman, the expressions they use are not to be taken literally. It is not the whole soul which comes to fertilize the mother, but only an emanation from this soul. In fact, according to their own statement, a soul equal or even superior in power to the one that is incarnated continues to live in the nanja tree or rock (see Nat. Tr., p. 514); we shall have occasion to come back to this point again (cf. below, p. 275).

[809] II, pp. 76, 81. According to Spencer and Gillen, the churinga is not the soul of the ancestor, but the object in which his soul resides. At bottom, these two mythological interpretations are identical, and it is easy to see how one has been able to pass into the other: the body is the place where the soul resides.

[810] Strehlow, I, p. 4.

[811] Strehlow, I, pp. 53 f. In these stories, the ancestor begins by introducing himself into the body of the woman and causing there the troubles characteristic of pregnancy. Then he goes out, and only then does he leave his namatuna.

[812] Strehlow, II, p. 76.

[813] Ibid., p. 81. This is the word for word translation of the terms employed, as Strehlow gives them: Dies du Körper bist; dies du der nämliche. In the myth, a civilizing hero, Mangarkunjerkunja, says as he presents to each man the churinga of his ancestor: "You are born of this churinga" (ibid., p. 76).