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The two ice-maidens were miserable on earth with him, and eventually escaped by the aid of one of their 'multiplex totems, the pine-tree. Wurrunnah had told them to get him pine bark. Now the Meamei Pleiades belong to the Beewee totem, so does the pine-tree.
The sacred animals of the nomes would then be "the totems of the clans which first settled in these localities." Later developments of religion never displaced these venerable emblems, if this be so, of tribal life. Frazer's Totemism. Most of the modern Egyptologists incline to the theory that animal worship, though not the only, was one of the chief sources of Egyptian religion.
Those with whom the Beewee shares the winds he counts as relations. Another totem is Gouyou, or Bandicoot. The animal has disappeared from the Narran district, but the totem tribe is still strong, though not so numerous as either the Beewees or Dinewans. Multiplex totems of Gouyou
The serpent in the Garden of Eden is another instance of the same cycle of ideas. The application of our present knowledge of totemism to mythology has been very enlightening. Students of Greek literature used to wonder why all the gods had birds and animals as companions. As a matter of fact, these animals were once sacred totems.
As rather favoring the idea of the totemic meaning of the carvings, it may be pointed out that a considerable number of the recognizable birds and animals are precisely the ones known to have been used as totems by many tribes of Indians.
It was found in full development among the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and other Southern tribes, including that remarkable people, the Natchez, who, judged by their religious and political institutions, seem a detached offshoot of the Toltec family. It is no less conspicuous among the roving Algonquins of the extreme North, where the number of totems is almost countless.
The myth of fire-stealing must necessarily have some other origin. 'Fire Totems' Mr. Alas! I never heard of fire totems before. Probably some one has been writing about them, somewhere, unless we owe them to Mr. Max Muller's own researches. Of course, he cites no authority for his fire totems.
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 Abbe interpreted their meaning, and with his finger pointed out the totems or signs manual usually a bird, beast, or fish of the chiefs who had signed the roll. The Council looked at the wampums with intense interest, well knowing the important part these Indians were capable of assuming in the war with England.
Various other usages and ideas would coalesce with those belonging to totemism proper: belief in the superhuman power of nonhuman things, including the conception of mana; the belief that every newborn child is the reincarnation of an ancestor; recognition of omens from the movements of such things; belief in the magical power of names; reverence for ancestors a natural feeling, in itself independent of the totemic conception; totems regarded as creators; the employment of totemic animals as emissaries to the supernatural Powers.
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