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Pagans they are and in this volume is a picture of one of their totem poles. Untouched by the progress of civilization, they live in the great Slavic ocean of people that has rolled over them in wave after wave, but has not changed them a bit.
If civilization be the analogue of geologic accretion, how tortuous is the trend and dip of the ethnological strata, how abrupt the overlapping of myths. How many aeons divided the totem coyote from the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus? Which is the primitive and parent flame, the sacred fire of Pueblo Estufas, of Greek Prytaneum, of Roman Vesta, of Persian Atish-khudahs?
They may be regarded as declensions from an earlier belief in the direct descent of the clan from the totem, or as independent conceptions that never grew into this belief. Both these ideas of the form of descent are found in widely separated regions and in communities differing one from another in general culture and in the degree of importance they attach to the totemic constitution.
The totems were small objects various in kind, such as the skin of a snake, a piece of the tail of a buffalo, a part of the horn of a buck, or a little packet of feathers. But every totem was sacred, and it was handled with worshipful care. The chief put them one by one into the medicine bag, which he handed to the temporary leader, the first scalp-taker, who would bear it in triumph home.
And if, in truth, there had ever really been a totem under the white paint I do not know, for like the Algonquins, these peoples had but a loose political, social, religious, and tribal organization, which never approached the perfection of the Iroquois system in any manner or detail.
When I reached home ten minutes since, after gormandizing with Mr. Handyside, I found the totem of the tribe awaiting me." "The what?" "An ivory skull." "You don't say!" and there was a genuine thrill in Winter's voice. "Anything else?" "There was no written legend. I have no doubt the enemy believes that such a work of art speaks for itself. It does. I am to be exterminated, I suppose."
Those who know the blacks and their love of a 'dolce far niente, will understand what a veritable hell this perpetual movement would make. The three deadly sins were unprovoked murder, lying to the elders of the tribe, or stealing a woman within the forbidden degrees that is, of the same hereditary totem, i.e. of the same blood, or of the prohibited family name clan.
There is what I call the totem of the Wahahbees the people who translate religion into dispute or persecution. In central Asia they get rid of an opponent by assassination in the name of Almighty God and his prophet. In the United States doctrine defenders are inconveniently placed, and they have to be content with newspaper and pulpit scolding and with excommunicating those who differ from them.
But all the old-timers knew well why she would never part with the Totem Pole. "No use to coax her," they would tell the curio-hunters. "It is to her what your family crest is to you. Would you sell your crest?" So year after year the greedy-eyed collectors would go away empty-handed, their coin in their pockets, and Hoolool's silent refusal in their memories.
What could be more obvious than that, following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask this partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the crowd?
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