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Updated: June 10, 2025
Religion does not free the forces of human nature to realise themselves in spontaneous activity, but enchains them to the punctilious service of a nonhuman authority. Everything exciting is kept at a distance, and men are trained in obedience and scrupulousness and self-denial.
Individuals may have imposed their guardian animals or plants on communities. A badge, chosen for convenience, may have been the beginning of a totemic organization. In these and other ways a group of men may have come to form intimate relations with a nonhuman group or other object. In many cases a rule of exogamy, for the better regulation of marriage, would be adopted.
It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his last penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from an ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal power and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, nonhuman criterion of life.
The life-force in its higher manifestations has been isolated in thought by some more advanced savages, especially in North America and Polynesia, and has been given a definite name; in Polynesia and Melanesia it is called mana, and other names for it occur elsewhere. +232+. It shows itself in any object, nonhuman or human, that produces extraordinary effects.
"As a medical man," said Calhoun carefully, "I question the existence of a local, nonhuman rational creature. Creatures develop or adapt to fit their environment. They change or develop to fit into some niche, some special place in the ecological system which is their environment. If there is no niche and no room for a specific creature in an environment, there is no such creature there!
We may begin with the cult of animals without thereby assuming that it came first in order of time. +241+. Of all nonhuman natural objects it would seem to have been the animal that most deeply impressed early man. All objects were potentially divine for him, and all received worship, but none entered so intimately into his life as animals.
+521+. From the point of view of religious history the important thing in any social organization is its character as framework for religious ideas and customs. If the central social fact is an intimate relation between a human group and a nonhuman class of natural objects, then conceptions regarding this relation may gather about it, and these will be as various as the tribes of men.
Savages rarely formulate their ideas on such a subject, but the belief in the future existence of nonhuman as well as human things is fairly established by the widespread practice of slaying animals at the tomb and burying with the dead the objects they are supposed to need in the other world.
In accordance with what is said above, the term 'totemism' may be used to mean particularly a simple alliance between men and nonhuman things, and then more generally to mean such an alliance combined in whatever way, with one or more of the particular customs described in preceding paragraphs. +466+. Geographical survey of totemistic usages.
In cases where there is more definite aid there is always the question whether the aid is afforded by the totem in its specific character of clan-brother or merely in its character of nonhuman powerful thing. Omens, for example, are given by all natural objects; when an object of this sort happens to be a totem, it is not clear that its capacity of omen-giving belongs to it simply as totem.
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