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The customs of certain tribes in the south are especially worthy of note: the pastoral Herrero have a double system of clans, maternal and paternal, and their food restrictions are curiously minute, relating to parts of animals or to their color; the Bakuana, who are pastoral and agricultural, kill the clan eponymous animals, though unwillingly, and appear not to regard them as ancestors.
We shall see that in most cases these festivals are associated though often loosely enough with the worship of a particular divinity. Sometimes, however, as in the case of the Lupercalia it is very difficult to discover who this divinity was; in other festivals, such as the Robigalia, it looks as if the eponymous deity was a comparatively late development.
The large number of stories in which the beginnings of clan life are attributed to marriages between clansmen and eponymous animals, or to beneficent or other adventures with such animals, may appear to indicate that there was an underlying belief in the descent of clans from animals. This latter view may be a bit of euhemeristic rationalism. They are not wholly lacking, however, in Australia.
In March there were in the developed Calendar no festivals of an immediately recognisable agricultural character, but the whole month was practically consecrated to its eponymous deity, Mars. If so, we may well have in these recurring festivals of Mars the sense, as Mr.
Documents of many kinds are to be found among them: comparative vocabularies, lists of divinities with their distinguishing epithets, chronological lists of kings and eponymous heroes, grammars, histories, tables of astronomical observations, scientific works of various descriptions, &c., &c.
+509+. In the great Bantu family the usages vary greatly. Here the eponymous animal approaches divinity not only is it killed with regret, it is a thing to swear by, and has magical power; but independence of the totem appears in the fact that it may be changed; that is, it is a friend adopted by men at their convenience.
There are traces of it in the Eastern tribes; but it is in its Western form that it is best known it is explicit among the Western Algonkins and the Siouan tribes, and on the Northwest Pacific Coast. The spirit is, as a rule, independent of the clan totem is found, indeed, in nontotemic tribes; it is often identical with the eponymous animal of some religious society.
+494+. The Caddoan group, dwelling formerly west of the Mississippi, in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, had an approach to specific totemism. In the Caddo tribe clansmen refrained from killing the eponymous animal; but all members of the tribe refrained from killing eagles and panthers. Whether this custom represents former clan restrictions is uncertain.
We shall then be armed, on the one hand, against the solemn bore who requires us to admire his imitation of an old master because it is in the tradition; on the other, against the portentous "Ist," whose parthenogenetic masterpiece we are not in a state to relish till we have sucked down the pseudo-philosophic bolus that embodies his eponymous "Ism."
It seemed to me that intellectual sympathy and the natural admiration which a younger man feels for a brilliant senior formed the obvious bond between them. But no sooner did Oscar republish "Dorian Gray" than ill-informed and worse-minded persons went about saying that the eponymous hero of the book was John Gray, though "Dorian Gray" was written before Oscar had met or heard of John Gray.
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