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Updated: May 27, 2025
But as the topic of Totemism has been introduced, I may say that many of the mysterious archaic markings on rocks, and decorations of implements, in other countries, are certainly known to be a kind of shorthand design of the totem animal. They were associated with rites which the oldest blacks decline to explain. The markings are understood to be totemic.
Byamee is the originator of things less archaic and important than totemism. There is a large stone fish-trap at Brewarrina, on the Barwan River. It is said to have been made by Byamee and his gigantic sons, just as later Greece attributed the walls of Tiryns to the Cyclops, or as Glasgow Cathedral has been explained in legend as the work of the Picts.
The clan Nongtathiang cannot eat the lemon, the Khar-umnuid clan must abstain from pork, the Cherra Siem family cannot eat dried fish, and the Siem family of Mylliem taboo the pumpkin. Possibly these taboos may be relics of totemism amongst these communities. The following are some of the other taboos, although some of them are but lightly regarded now-a-days.
The evidence there adduced is not all of the same value, and the papers are only a hasty rough sketch based on the first testimonies that came to hand. Probably the most important 'survival' of totemism in Greek legend is the body of stories about the amours of Zeus in animal form.
Thus the resultant social system would be a congeries of beliefs and usages, and in such a system, when it appears, the totemic element must be distinguished from its attachments, which must be referred each to its appropriate source. +563+. Function of totemism in the development of society.
+516+. Not all of these points are found in any one case, but their occurrence over so wide an area, it is argued, is most naturally explicable by the assumption of an original totemism of which these are the survivals. It is suggested also that they may be an inheritance from savage predecessors of the civilized peoples.
Thus totemism has commonly been treated as a primitive system, both of religion and of society." In absorbing the Dravidian tribes, Brahmanism appropriated the totemistic cult and incorporated it into the caste system. And many Dravidian castes which are identified with this cult have the striking peculiarity of being exogamous as contrasted with the endogamy of the Aryan section of Hindu castes.
Professor Sayce remarks, 'They were the sacred animals of the clans, survivals from an age 'when the religion of Egypt was totemism. 'In Egypt the gods themselves are totem-deities, i.e. personifications or individual representations of the sacred character and attributes which in the purely totem stage of religion were ascribed without distinction to all animals of the holy kind. So says Dr.
The facts of savage animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to or unappreciated by scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in Egyptian religion. Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an isolated case.
This kind of wide comparison is the method of Anthropology. Thus Prof. Rhys and others find so very archaic an institution as the reckoning of descent in the female line, inheritance going through the Mother, among the Picts of Scotland, and they even find traces of totemism, an institution already outworn among several of the naked tribes of Australia, who reckon descent in the male line.
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