Modern Mythology Part 8

What a Totem is

Though our adversary now abandons totems, he returns to them elsewhere (i. 198-202). 'Totem is the corruption of a term used by North American Indians in the sense of clan-mark or sign-board ("ododam").' The totem was originally a rude emblem of an animal or other object 'placed by North American Indians in front of their settlements.'

The Evidence for Sign-boards

Our author's evidence for sign-boards is from an Ottawa Indian, and is published from his MS. by Mr. Hoskyns Abrahall. {73} The testimony is of the greatest merit, for it appears to have first seen the light in a Canadian paper of 1858. Now in 1858 totems were only spoken of in Lafitau, Long, and such old writers, and in Cooper's novels. They had not become subjects of scientific dispute, so the evidence is uncontaminated by theory. The Indians were, we learn, divided into [local?] tribes, and these 'into sections or families according to their ododams'--devices, signs, in modern usage 'coats of arms.' [Perhaps 'crests' would be a better word.] All people of one ododam (apparently under male kins.h.i.+p) lived together in a special section of each village.

At the entrance to the enclosure was the figure of an animal, or some other sign, set up on the top of one of the posts. Thus everybody knew what family dwelt in what section of the village. Some of the families were called after their ododam. But the family with the bear ododam were called Big Feet, not Bears. Sometimes parts of different animals were 'quartered' [my suggestion], and one ododam was a small hawk and the fins of a sturgeon.

We cannot tell, of course, on the evidence here, whether 'Big Feet'

suggested 'Bear,' or vice versa, or neither. But Mr. Frazer has remarked that periphrases for sacred beasts, like 'Big Feet' for Bear, are not uncommon. Nor can we tell 'what couple of ancestors' a small hawk and a sturgeon's fins represent, unless, perhaps, a hawk and a sturgeon. {74a}

For all this, Mr. Max Muller suggests the explanation that people who marked their abode with crow or wolf might come to be called Wolves or Crows. {74b} Again, people might borrow beast names from the prevalent beast of their district, as Arkades, [Greek], Bears, and so evolve the myth of descent from Callisto as a she-bear. 'All this, however, is only guesswork.' The Snake Indians wors.h.i.+p no snake. [The Snake Indians are not a totem group, but a local tribe named from the Snake River, as we say, 'An Ettrick man.'] Once more, the name-giving beast, say, 'Great Hare,' is explained by Dr. Brinton as 'the inevitable Dawn.' {74c} 'Hasty writers,' remarks Dr. Brinton, 'say that the Indians claim descent from different wild beasts.' For evidence I refer to that hasty writer, Mr.

Frazer, and his book, Totemism. For a newly sprung up modern totem our author alludes to a boat, among the Mandans, 'their totem, or tutelary object of wors.h.i.+p.' An object of wors.h.i.+p, of course, is not necessarily a totem! Nor is a totem by the definition (as a rule one of a _cla.s.s_ of objects) anything but a _natural_ object. Mr. Max Muller wishes that 'those who write about totems and totemism would tell us exactly what they mean by these words.' I have told him, and indicated better sources. I apply the word totemism to the widely diffused savage inst.i.tution which I have defined.

More about Totems

The origin of totemism is unknown to me, as to Mr. McLennan and Dr.

Robertson Smith, but Mr. Max Muller knows this origin. 'A totem is a clan-mark, then a clan-name, then the name of the ancestor of a clan, and lastly the name of something wors.h.i.+pped by a clan' (i. 201). 'All this applies in the first instance to Red Indians only.' Yes, and 'clan'

applies in the first instance to the Scottish clans only! When Mr. Max Muller speaks of 'clans' among the Red Indians, he uses a word whose connotation differs from anything known to exist in America. But the a.n.a.logy between a Scottish clan and an American totem-kin is close enough to justify Mr. Max Muller in speaking of Red Indian 'clans.' By parity of reasoning, the a.n.a.logy between the Australian Kobong and the American totem is so complete that we may speak of 'Totemism' in Australia. It would be childish to talk of 'Totemism' in North America, 'Kobongism' in Australia, 'Pacarissaism' in the realm of the Incas: totems, kobongs, and pacarissas all amounting to the same thing, except in one point. I am not aware that Australian blacks erect, or that the subjects of the Incas, or that African and Indian and Asiatic totemists, erected 'sign- boards' anywhere, as the Ottawa writer a.s.sures us that the Ottawas do, or used to do. And, if they don't, how do we know that kobongs and pacarissas were developed out of sign-boards?

Heraldry and Totems

The Ottawas are armigeri, are heraldic; so are the natives of Vancouver's Island, who have wooden pillars with elaborate quarterings. Examples are in South Kensington Museum. But this savage heraldry is not nearly so common as the inst.i.tution of totemism. Thus it is difficult to prove that the heraldry is the origin of totemism, which is just as likely, or more likely, to have been the origin of savage heraldic crests and quarterings. Mr. Max Muller allows that there may be other origins.

G.o.ds and Totems

Our author refers to unnamed writers who call Indra or Ammon a totem (i.

200).

This is a foolish liberty with language. 'Why should not all the G.o.ds of Egypt with their heads of bulls and apes and cats be survivals of totemisms?' Why not, indeed? Professor Sayce remarks, 'They were the sacred animals of the clans,' survivals from an age 'when the religion of Egypt was totemism.' 'In Egypt the G.o.ds themselves are totem-deities, i.e. personifications or individual representations of the sacred character and attributes which in the purely totem stage of religion were ascribed without distinction to all animals of the holy kind.' So says Dr. Robertson Smith. He and Mr. Sayce are 'scholars,' not mere unscholarly anthropologists. {76}

An Objection

Lastly (ii. 403), when totems infected 'even those who ought to have been proof against this infantile complaint' (which is not even a 'disease of language' of a respectable type), then 'the objection that a totem meant originally a clan-mark was treated as scholastic pedantry.' Alas, I fear with justice! For if I call Mr. Arthur Balfour a Tory will Mr. Max Muller refute my opinion by urging that 'a Tory meant originally an Irish rapparee,' or whatever the word _did_ originally mean?

Mr. Max Muller decides that 'we never find a religion consisting exclusively of a belief in fetishes, or totems, or ancestral spirits.'

Here, at last, we are in absolute agreement. So much for totems and sign- boards. Only a weak fanatic will find a totem in every animal connected with G.o.ds, sacred names, and religious symbols. But totemism is a fact, whether 'totem' originally meant a clan-mark or sign-board in America or not. And, like Mr. Sayce, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Rhys, Dr. Robertson Smith, I believe that totemism has left marks in civilised myth, ritual, and religion, and that these survivals, not a 'disease of language,' explain certain odd elements in the old civilisations.

A Weak Brother

Our author's habit of omitting references to his opponents has here caused me infinite inconvenience. He speaks of some eccentric person who has averred that a 'fetish' is a 'totem,' inhabited by 'an ancestral spirit.' To myself it seems that you might as well say 'Abracadabra is gas and gaiters.' As no reference was offered, I invented 'a wild surmise' that Mr. Max Muller had conceivably misapprehended Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of totems. Had our author only treated himself fairly, he would have referred to his own Anthropological Religion (pp.

126 and 407), where the name of the eccentric definer is given as that of Herr Lippert. {78} Then came into my mind the words of Professor Tiele, 'Beware of weak brethren'--such as Herr Lippert seems, as far as this definition is concerned, to be.

n.o.body knows the origin of totemism. We find no race on its way to becoming totemistic, though we find several in the way of ceasing to be so. They are abandoning female kins.h.i.+p for paternity; their rules of marriage and taboo are breaking down; perhaps various totem kindreds of different crests and names are blending into one local tribe, under the name, perhaps, of the most prosperous totem-kin. But we see no race on its way to becoming totemistic, so we have no historical evidence as to the origin of the inst.i.tution. Mr. McLennan offered no conjecture, Professor Robertson Smith offered none, nor have I displayed the spirit of scientific exact.i.tude by a guess in the dark. To gratify Mr. Max Muller by defining totemism as Mr. McLennan first used the term is all that I dare do. Here one may remark that if Mr. Max Muller really wants 'an accurate definition' of totemism, the works of McLennan, Frazer, Robertson Smith, and myself are accessible, and contain our definitions.

He does not produce these definitions, and criticise them; he produces Dr. Lippert's and criticises that. An argument should be met in its strongest and most authoritative form. 'Define what you mean by a totem,' says Professor Max Muller in his Gifford Lectures of 1891 (p.

123). He had to look no further for a definition, an authoritative definition, than to 'totem' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or to McLennan. Yet his large and intelligent Glasgow audience, and his readers, may very well be under the impression that a definition of 'totem' is 'still to seek,' like Prince Charlie's religion. Controversy simply cannot be profitably conducted on these terms.

'The best representatives of anthropology are now engaged not so much in comparing as in discriminating.' {79} Why not refer, then, to the results of their discriminating efforts? 'To treat all animal wors.h.i.+p as due to totemism is a mistake.' Do we make it?

Mr. Frazer and Myself

There is, or was, a difference of opinion between Mr. Frazer and myself as to the causes of the appearance of certain sacred animals in Greek religion. My notions were published in Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887), Mr. Frazer's in The Golden Bough (1890). Necessarily I was unaware in 1887 of Mr. Frazer's still unpublished theory. Now that I have read it, he seems to me to have the better logic on his side; and if I do not as yet wholly agree with him, it is because I am not yet certain that both of our theories may not have their proper place in Greek mythology.

Greek Totemism

In C. and M. (p. 106) I describe the social aspects of totemism. I ask if there are traces of it in Greece. Suppose, for argument's sake, that in prehistoric Greece the mouse had been a totem, as it is among the Oraons of Bengal. {80} In that case (1) places might be named from a mouse tribe; (2) mice might be held sacred per se; (3) the mouse name might be given locally to a G.o.d who superseded the mouse in pride of place; (4) images of the mouse might be a.s.sociated with that of the G.o.d, (5) and used as a local badge or mark; (6) myths might be invented to explain the forgotten cause of this prominence of the mouse. If all these notes occur, they would raise a presumption in favour of totemism in the past of Greece. I then give evidence in detail, proving that all these six facts do occur among Greeks of the Troads and sporadically elsewhere. I add that, granting for the sake of argument that these traces may point to totemism in the remote past, the mouse, though originally a totem, '_need not have been an Aryan totem_' (p. 116).

I offer a list of other animals closely connected with Apollo, giving him a beast's name (wolf, ram, dolphin), and a.s.sociated with him in myth and art. In M. R. R. I apply similar arguments in the case of Artemis and the Bear, of Dionysus and the Bull, Demeter and the Pig, and so forth.

Moreover, I account for the myths of descent of Greek human families from G.o.ds disguised as dogs, ants, serpents, bulls, and swans, on the hypothesis that kindreds who originally, in totemistic fas.h.i.+on, traced to beasts sans phrase, later explained their own myth to themselves by saying that the paternal beast was only a G.o.d in disguise and en bonne fortune.

This hypothesis at least 'colligates the facts,' and brings them into intelligible relations.h.i.+p with widely-diffused savage inst.i.tutions and myths.

The Greek Mouse-totem?

My theory connecting Apollo Smintheus and the place-names derived from mice with a possible prehistoric mouse-totem gave me, I confess, considerable satisfaction. But in Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough (ii. 129- 132) is published a group of cases in which mice and other vermin are wors.h.i.+pped for prudential reasons--to get them to go away. In the Cla.s.sical Review (vol. vi. 1892) Mr. Ward Fowler quotes Aristotle and AElian on plagues of mice, like the recent invasion of voles on the Border sheep-farms. He adopts the theory that the sacred mice were adored by way of propitiating them. Thus Apollo may be connected with mice, not as a G.o.d who superseded a mouse-totem, but as an expeller of mice, like the worm-killing Heracles, and the Locust-Heracles, and the Locust-Apollo. {81a} The locust is still painted red, salaamed to, and set free in India, by way of propitiating his companions. {81b} Thus the Mouse-Apollo (Smintheus) would be merely a G.o.d noted for his usefulness in getting rid of mice, and any wors.h.i.+p given to mice (feeding them, placing their images on altars, their stamp on coins, naming places after them, and so on) would be mere acts of propitiation.

There would be no mouse-totem in the background. I do not feel quite convinced--the mouse being a totem, and a sacred or tabooed animal, in India and Egypt. {82a} But I am content to remain in a balance of opinion. That the Mouse is the Night (Gubernatis), or the Lightning (Grohmann), I am disinclined to believe. Philologists are very apt to jump at contending meteorological explanations of mice and such small deer without real necessity, and an anthropologist is very apt to jump at an equally unnecessary and perhaps equally undemonstrated totem.