Myth, Ritual and Religion

pte

f Savages — Confusion

ks to the credulity, by myths in answer to all inquiries — Evidence for this — Mr. Tylor’s opinion — Mr. Im Thurn — Jesuit missionaries’ Relations — Examples of confusion between men, plants, beasts and other natural objects — Reports of travellers — Evidence from institution of totemism — Definition of totemism — Totemism i

we have found that stage in the condition of savagery. We now proceed to array the evidence for the mental processes of savages. We inte

it is enough to select a few speci

he savage, at all events when myth-making, draws no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the world. He regards himself as literally akin to animals and plants and heavenly bodies

ir order, rivers dry up, animals are their servants and hold converse with them. These magicians cause or heal diseases, and can command even the weather, bringing rain or thunder or sunshine at their will.2 There are few supernatural attributes of “cloud-compelling Zeus” or of Apollo

all of the conjuror, whom they aid with their advice and with their magical power. By virtue of the close connection already spoken of between man and the animals, the souls of the dead are not rarely supposed to migrate into the bodies of beasts, or to revert to the condition of that species of creatures with which each tribe supposes itself

ng separable, capable of being located in an external object, or something with a definite locality in the body. A man’s strength and spirit may reside in his kidney fat, in his heart, in a lock of his hair, or may e

em) are always UNNATURAL, that death is always caused by some hostile spirit or conjuror. From this opinion comes the myth that man is naturally not subject

ct is also lazy, and he is content with the first answer that comes to hand. “Ils s’arretent aux premieres notions qu’ils en ont,” says Pere Hierome Lalemant.3 “Nothing,” says Schoolcraft, “is too capacious (sic) for Indian belief.”4 The replies to his questions he receives from tradition or (when a new problem arises) evolves an answer for himself in the shape of STORIES. Just as Socrates, in the Platonic dialogues, recalls or invents a myth in t

us animals and plants, the origin of death itself, the origin of the perplexing traditional tribal customs, are all accounted for in stories. At the same time, an actual divine Maker is sometimes postulated. The stories, again, are fashioned in accordance with the beliefs already named: the belief in human co

of the mythology of the Greeks or the Aryans of India is but a similar walpurgis nacht, in which an incestuous or amorous god may become a beast, and the object of his pursuit, once a woman, may also become a beast, and then shift shapes to a tree or a bird or a star. But in the civilised races the genius of the people tends to suppress, exclude and refine away the wild element, which, however, is never wholly eliminated. The Erinyes soon stop the mouth of the horse of Achilles when he begins, like the horse in Grimm’s Goose Girl, to

us and confused state of mind, to which all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and reason,” does really exist.7 The exist

of the life of plants and stones is on the same level of unreason, as we moderns reckon reason. He believes in the spirits of rocks and stones, undeterred by the absence of motion in these objects. “Not only many rocks, but also many waterfalls, streams, and indeed material objects of every sort, are supposed each to consist of a body and a spirit, as does man.”10 It is not our business to ask here how men came by the belief in universal animation. That belief is gradually withdrawn, distinctions are gradually introduced, as civilisation and knowledge advance. It is enough for us if the failure to draw a hard and fast line between man and beasts, stones and plants, be practically universal among savages, and if it gradually disappears before the fuller knowledge of civilisation. The report which Mr. Im Thurn brings from the Indians of Guiana is confirmed by what Schoolcraft says of the Algonkin races of the northern part of the continent. “The belief of the narrators and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told helps wonderfully in the original stories, in joining all parts together. The Indian believes that the whole visible and invisible creation is animated. . . . To make the matter worse, these tribes believe that animals of the lowest as well as highest class in the chain of creation are alike endowed with reasoning powers and faculties. As a natural conclusion they endow birds, beasts and all other animals with souls.”11 As an example of the ease with which the savage recognises consciousness and voluntary motion even in stones, may be cited Kohl’s account of the beliefs of the Objibeways.12 Nearly every Indian has discovered, he says, an object in which he places special confidence, and to which he sacrifices mo

of a patient in a fever-ward”. If any relics of such imagination survive in civilised mythology, they will very closely resemble the productions of a once universal “temporary insanity”. Let it be granted, then, that “to the lower tribes of man, sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal, animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies, and performing their special functions in the universe with the aid of limbs like beasts, or of artificial inst

onfusion between man and other things in the world, which will presently be il

, like Herodotus with the sacred stories of the Egyptian priests, Mr. Schoolcraft “cannot induce himself to write it out”.20 It is a most curious fact that the natives of Australia tell a similar tale of THEIR “native bear”. “He did not die” when attacked by men.21 In parts of Australia it is a great offence to skin the native bear, just as on a part of the west coast of Ireland, where seals are superstitiously regarded, the people cannot be bribed to skin them. In New Caledonia, when a child tries to kill a lizard, the men warn him to “beware of killing his own ancesto

s. It is the rule, and not the exception, that savage societies are founded upon this belief. The political and social conduct of the backward races is regulated in such matters as blood-feud and marriage by theories of the actual kindred and connection by descent, or by old friendship, which men have in common with beasts, plants, the sun and moon, the stars, and even the wind and the rain. Now, in whatever way this belief in such relations to beasts and plants may have arisen, it undoubtedly testifies to a condition of mind in which no hard a

but as “totemism” has the advantage of possessing the ground, we prefer to say “totemism” rather than “otemism”. The facts are the same, whatever name we give them. As Mr. Muller says himself,29 “every warrior has his crest, which is called his totem”;30 and he goes on to describe a totem of an Indian who died about 1793. We may now return to the consideration of “otemism” or totemism. We approach it rather as a fact in the science of mythology than as a stage in the evolution of the modern family system. For us totemism is interesting because it proves the existence of t

believing themselves to be related by the ties of blood and common descent. That descent the groups agree in tracing, not from some real or idealised human parent, but from some animal, plant, or other natural object, as the kangaroo, the emu, the iguana, the pelican, and so forth. Persons of the pelican stock in the north of Queensland regard themselves as relations of people of the same stock in the most southern parts of Australia. The creature from which each tribe claims descent is called “of the same flesh,” while persons of another stock are “fresh flesh”. A native may not marry a woman of

e) with himself, excepting when hunger compels, and then they express sorrow for having to eat their wingong (friends) or tumanang (their flesh). When using the last word they touch their breasts, to indicate the close relationship, meaning almost a portion of themselves. To illustrate: One day one of the blacks killed a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa (a man of the crow surname and stock), named Larry, died. He had been ailing for some days, but the killing of his wingong (totem) hastened his death.”33 Commenting on this statement, Mr. Fison observes: “The South Australian savage looks upon the universe as the Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs; and all things, animate and inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate whereof he himself is part”. This account of the Australian beliefs and customs is borne out, to a certain extent, by the evidence of Sir George Grey,34 and of the late Mr. Gideon Scott Lang.35 These two writers take no account of the singular “dichotomous” divisions, as of Kumite and Kroki, but t

fore did he ea

yl-yas storms a

fore would he

d so forth. This point is very strongly put by Mr. Dawson, who has had much experience of the blacks. “So strictly are the laws of marriage carried out, that, should any sign of courtship or affection be observed between those ‘of one flesh,’ the brothers or male relatives of the woman beat her severely.” If the incestuous pair (though not in the l

hip shared with the animals) must be a thoroughly bindin

le parentage is uncertain.39 One other feature of Australian totemism must be mentioned before we leave the subject. There is some evidence that in certain tribes the wingong or totem of each man is indicated by a tattooed representation of it upon his flesh. The natives are very licentious, but men would shrink from an amour with a woman who neither belonged to their own district nor spoke their language, but who, in spite of that, was of their totem. To avoid mistake

of the same animal or plant may not intermarry, while men are obliged to defend, and in case of murder to avenge, persons of the stock of the family or plant from which they themselves derive their family name. Thus, on the evidence of institutions, it is plain that the Australians are (or before the influence of the Europeans became prevalent were) in a state of mind which draws no hard and fast line between man and the thing

east all of them which Mr. Bowditch could get the native interpreters to translate, are derived from animals, plants and other natural objects, just as in Australia.43 Thus Quonna is a buffalo, Abrootoo is a cornstalk, Abbradi a plantain. Other names are, in English, the parrot, the wild cat, red earth, panther and dog. Thus all the natives of this part of Africa are parrots, dogs, buffaloes, panthers, and so forth, just as the Australians are emus, iguanas, black cockatoos, kangaroos, and the rest. It is remarkable that there is an Incra stock, or clan of ants, in Ashantee, just as there was a race of Myrmidons, believed to be descended from or otherwise connected with ants, in ancient Greece. Though Bowditch’s account of these West African family divisions is brief, the arrangement tallies closely with that of Australia. It is no great stretch of imagination to infer that the African tribes do, or once did, believe themselves to be of the kindred of the animals whose names they bear.44 It is more or less confirmatory of this hypothesis that no family is permitted to use as food the animal from which it derives its name. We have seen that a similar rule prevails, as far as hunger and scarcity of victuals permit it to be obeyed, among the natives of Australia

r chief or of the district which they inhabit” (local tribes, as in Australia), “each stock (tribu) derives its title from an animal or a vegetable. All the Bechuanas are subdivided thus into Bakuenas (crocodile-men), Batlapis (men of the fish), Banarer (of the buffalo), Banukus (porcupines), Bamoraras (wild vines), and so forth. The Bakuenas call the crocodile their father, sing about him in their feasts, swear by him, and mark the ears of their cattle with an incision which resembles the o

and the similar customs of North American races. Livingstone’s account48 on the whole corroborates that of Casalis, though he says the Batau (tribe of the lion) no longer exists. “They use the word bina ‘to dance,’ in reference to the custom of thus naming themselves, so that when you wish to ascertain what tribe they belong to, you say, ‘Wh

s not wholly ignorant of the languages, as it was his business to speak them, and he was an adopted Indian. The ceremony of adoption was painful, beginning with a feast of dog’s flesh, followed by a Turkish bath and a prolonged process of tattooing.50 According to Long,51 “The totam, they conceive, assumes the form of some beast or other, and therefore they never kill, hurt, or eat the animal whose form they think

ested a heraldic ancestor of Gibbon the historian,55 who settled in the colony. According to Schoolcraft,56 the totem or family badge, of a dead warrior is drawn in a reverse position on his grave-post. In the same way the leopards of England are drawn reversed on the shield of an English king opposite the mention of his death in old monkish chronicles. As a general rule,57 persons bearing the same totem in America cannot intermarry. “The union must be between various totems.” Moreover, as in the case of the Australians, “the descent of the chief is in the female line”. We thus find among the Red Men precisely the same totemistic regulations as among the Aborigines of Australia. Like the Australians, the Re

of prodigious size”), while another stock derive their lineage from the carp, and a third descends from a bear; yet they do not scruple, afte

ns survived in custom and folk-lore after the official recognition of Christianity. Sun-worship, in Peru, and the belief in a Supreme Creator there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise with the lower beliefs, and to have been content to allow a certain amount of bowing down in the temples of the elder faiths. According, then, to Garcilasso’s account of Peruvian totemism, “An Indian was not looked upon as honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river,65 or lake, or even from the sea, OR FROM A WILD ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey “.66 A certain amount of worship was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts and natural objects. Men offered up to their totems “what they usually saw them eat”.67 On the seacoasts “they worshipped sardines, skates, dog-fish, and, for want of larger gods, crabs. . . . There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god,” including “lizards, toads and frogs.” Garcilasso (who says they ate the fish they worshipped) gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the beginning men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one human stock from another. “The one desired to have a god different from the other. . . . They only thought of making one different from another.” When the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed “splendour and beauty” as contrasted with “the ugliness and filth of the frogs and other vermin they looked upon as gods”.68

lace, Travels on Amaz

ges dans l’Ameri

marry (as among the Red Indians and Australians) a woman belonging to his own stock, motherhood or mahari. So far the maharis of Bengal exactly correspond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis also take their names from plants and animals, and so forth? We know that the Killis, similar communities among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this.72 “The Mundaris, like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal distinction the name of some animal, and the flesh of that animal is tabooed to them as food; for example, the eel, the tortoise.” This is exactly the state o

n India is given by Mr. H. H. Ris

oken up into a number of what may be called totemistic exogamous septs. Each sept bears the name of an animal, a tree, a plant, or of some mater

or. A tendency in this direction has been observed by Messrs. Fison and Howitt even in Australia. The Mahilis, Koras and Kurmis, who profess to be members of the Hindu community, still retain the totemistic organisation, with names derived from birds, beasts and plants. Even the Jagannathi Kumhars of Orissa, taking rank immediately below the writer-caste,

position as the Brahmans, “divided into exogamous sections (gotras), the members of which profess to be descended from the mythical rishi or inspired saint whose name the gotra bears”. There is thus nothing to bar the conjecture tha

ia, we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: “Each tribe of these people look upon some particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan, goose, raven, etc., and such is not eaten by that tribe” though the others may eat it.82 As the majority of our witnesses were quite unaware that the facts they described were common among races of whom many of them had never even heard, their evidence may surely be accepted as valid, especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in other obvious and palpable shapes. If we have not made out, by the evidence of institutions, that a confused credulity concerning the equality and kinship of man and the objects in nature is actually a ruling belief among savages, and even hi