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The origin of other totems, equally strange, if not even stranger, is similarly accounted for, though otherwise unaccountable. One of the New-Zealand chiefs claimed as his progenitor the neighbouring great mountain, Tongariro. This seemingly-whimsical belief becomes intelligible when we observe how easily it may have arisen from a nickname.
The fully initiated of each tribe, as they arrived, help in the preparation of the inner sacred ground, while the younger men collected game and other food. The old men cut out of the ground along the narrow path leading to the Bunbul, and round it, huge earthen animals, their various totems, such as crocodiles, kangaroos, emus and others, all of a colossal size.
Six-inch trees, throated with rotten remnants of thatched roofs through which they had aspired toward the sun, rose about him. Quick-growing trees had shadowed the kingposts so that the idols and totems, seated in carved shark jaws, grinned greenly and monstrously at the futility of man through a rime of moss and mottled fungus.
There are five separate totems or crests among these people, established, apparently, to avoid too close blood relationships. The several tribes are supposed to have been originally about equally divided under these different totems. Marriage between those of the same totem is forbidden, and the system is perpetuated by the children adopting the totem or crest of the mother. Religion.
'May your shadow never be less! The shadow of a wirreenun is, like his head, always mahgarl, or taboo; any one touching either will be made to suffer for such sacrilege. A man's Minggah is generally a tree from amongst his multiplex totems, as having greater reason to help him, being of the same family.
And so he adopted for his totems or presiding spirits every possible animal, as we have seen, and all sorts of nature-phenomena, such as rain and fire and water and clouds, and sun, moon and stars which WE consider quite senseless and inanimate. Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he felt the same compunction as I have described him feeling towards his brother tribesmen.
Farnell, but a tendency to seek for exclusively vegetable origins of gods is to be observed in some of the most recent speculations. I well know that I myself am apt to press a theory of totems too far, and in the following pages I suggest reserves, limitations, and alternative hypotheses.
Within, you would have seen the crowded dwellings of bark, shaped like the arched coverings of huge baggage-wagons, and decorated with the totems or armorial devices of their owners daubed on the outside with paint.
Other cases of divergence between employment of animals and their position as totems have been cited in Uganda, for example; but civilization is relatively far advanced in Uganda, and in such cases we cannot infer original conditions from existing customs. +568+. It may fairly be surmised that observation in some cases led to the domestic use of animals.
What is the meaning, if meaning there be, of the broken figurines or stone "dolls"? They have been styled "totems" by persons who do not know the meaning of the word "totem," which merely denotes the natural object, usually a plant or animal, after which sets of kinsfolk are named among certain savage tribes. Let us call the little figures "figurines," for that commits us to nothing.
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