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Such ceremonies exist, or have existed, in many regions and among peoples of various grades of culture, civilized as well as savage, but the cases in which they are, or were, conducted by totemistic clans are comparatively few.
So far the assertion that the Semites are naturally monotheists is true; but the same is true of all totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community with such a divine head, and the worship of that god is the only one possible to him.
Representations of the whole body are frequent, so are female statues; these I have only found again in Gaua, where they are probably modern inventions. Sometimes a fish or a bird is carved on the statue, probably as a survival of old totemistic ideas, and meant to represent the totem animal of the ancestor or of his clan.
Like all early religions, that of Babylonia is broken up into a multiplicity of local worships. There is no common system, but each place has its own god or gods and its own sacred rites. In Egypt we shall find reason to believe that this state of matters had its origin in an early totemistic arrangement of society; whether the same was the case in Babylonia or not, it is vain to speculate.
Beyond taboos on sacred objects there is nothing in the Bantu territory that clearly indicates a totemistic organization of society. +510+. In the half-civilized and higher savage communities of the eastern and western parts of the continent totemism proper, if it has ever been predominant, has been expelled or depressed by higher forms of organization.
The growth of clans into tribes, the promotion of voluntary organizations, secret societies, which displace the old totemistic groups, the growth of agriculture and of commercial relations all things, in a word, that tend to make the individual prominent and to further family life lead naturally to the abrogation of oppressive taboos.
The queer totemistic designs of American coinage are a consequence of this decision. The formation of national government by voluntary agreement is a unique event. The explanation of this peculiar result in the case of America is the unifying influence of Hamilton's measures.
"In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly enough the relation of man to food-animals. You need or at least desire flesh food, yet you shrink from slaughtering 'your brother the ox'; you desire his mana, yet you respect his tabu, for in you and him alike runs the common life-blood.
Other traces of totemistic arrangements may be suspected here and there in Egyptian observances, but even did the analogy extend no further than to the facts just mentioned, there would be a case for considering whether the nomes were not first peopled by a set of totemistic clans, who, even after they were united in one people, preserved their early separate traditions.
It is an earlier stage of this view, when men are of the same worship because they are descended from the same animal, and when they worship that animal. It was formerly held that the Semites were an exception, having never passed through the totemistic stage. Mr.
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