clan-names

Updated: May 29, 2025

Animal clan-names and tribe-names, belief in kinship with animals and plants and in descent from them, exogamy, transformations, refusal to eat certain animals except ceremonially, apologies for killing them, omens derived from them, worship of animal-gods, incarnations of gods in animals, animals sacred to gods, tribal marks derived from animals all these are found in such diverse social combinations that it is impossible to infer merely from the occurrence of this or that custom the existence of the peculiar form of social organization to which the name 'totemism' proper is given above.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

Some adjacent tribes eat them only at a pinch, others refrain from them. The clans of the Narrinyeri are mostly localized, and the clan-names are not now those of the totems; the totems are eaten. The Kurnai show the greatest divergence from the ordinary type they have neither totemic clans nor exogamous classes; their rule of exogamy relates to districts.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

+557+. It is obviously true that human groups have names derived from objects with which they are somehow specially connected; in the lists of clan-names in Oceania, Africa, India, America, animal names predominate, but many are taken from plants, and some from inanimate objects; when groups become settled they are sometimes called after their places of abode.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

Isolated names like those of the kings Numa, Ancus, Tullus, to whom the clan-names were probably only assigned subsequently, and isolated facts, such as the conquest of the Latins by king Tarquinius and the expulsion of the Tarquinian royal house, may have continued to live in true general tradition orally transmitted.

Theodor Mommsen - The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5)

Isolated names like those of the kings Numa, Ancus, Tullus, to whom the clan-names were probably only assigned subsequently, and isolated facts, such as the conquest of the Latins by king Tarquinius and the expulsion of the Tarquinian royal house, may have continued to live in true general tradition orally transmitted.

Theodor Mommsen - The History of Rome, Book II : From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy