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Updated: May 17, 2025
These ceremonies they have named Intichiuma, and the name will probably stick, though there is reason to believe that the native word for them is really something different. Their purpose is to make the food-animals and food-plants multiply and prosper. Each animal or plant is attended to by the group that has it for a totem.
Nobody knows so well as he that similar claims of descent from dogs and snakes are made by many savage kindreds who have no agriculture, no corn, and, of course, no corn-spirits. These remarks, I trust, are not undiscriminating, and naturally I yield the bull Dionysus and the pig Demeter to the corn-spirit, vice totem, superseded.
+273+. It is not impossible that totem posts may be connected with original totem trees or other sacred trees. A tree as totem would naturally be the object of some sort of cult, and when it took the form of a post or pole, would have totemic symbols carved on it. In all such cases there is a coalescence of totemism and tree worship.
Many of the tribes, like the Aleuts, Eskimos, Dyaks, Papuans, Fuegians, etc., are themselves in the Neolithic stage of culture though for the reason given above probably degenerated physically from the standard of their neolithic ancestors; and so the conclusion is forced upon one that there must have been an IMMENSE PERIOD, prior to the first beginnings of 'civilization, in which the human tribes in general led a peaceful and friendly life on the earth, comparatively little broken up by dissensions, in close contact with Nature and in that degree of sympathy with and understanding of the Animals which led to the establishment of the Totem system.
'When a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem. Distinguo! A savage does not name himself after his totem, any more than Mr. Frazer named himself by his clan-name, originally Norman. It was not as when Miss Betty Amory named herself 'Blanche, by her own will and fantasy.
She, too, was a Pequot, but the turtle totem was on her bosom, and when she begged his life, because they had been betrothed, the captors paused to talk of it. She had chosen well the time to interfere, for a band of Hurons was approaching, and even as the talk went on their yell was heard in the wood.
He would rather connect it with Totemism, urging that the primitive stages of religious evolution go to show that, "The ancient nations came, in pre-historic times, through the Totem stage, having animals, and plants, and the heavenly bodies conceived as animals, for gods before the anthropomorphic gods appeared;" While Mr.
Representations of the whole body are frequent, so are female statues; these I have only found again in Gaua, where they are probably modern inventions. Sometimes a fish or a bird is carved on the statue, probably as a survival of old totemistic ideas, and meant to represent the totem animal of the ancestor or of his clan.
Against this view it can hardly be thought to militate that the Batak does not in set terms affirm his external soul to be in his totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal or plant of his clan. For if a savage seriously believes that his life is bound up with an external object, it is in the last degree unlikely that he will let any stranger into the secret.
Scholars do not, however, agree as to the place of the rebirth idea in the Helgi poems, some holding the view that it is an essential part of the story. Hunding. It is possible that the werwolf story is a totem survival. If so, the Hunding feud might easily belong to it: dogs are the natural enemies of wolves. This story, which has not been printed, will be found in the Bodleian MS. Laud, 610.
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