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Updated: May 27, 2025
As to traces of Totemism in Scotland and Ireland, I am not persuaded by Professor Rhys that they occur, and are attested by Celtic legends about the connection of men and kinships with animals, and by personal and kinship names derived from animals. The question is very obscure.
It would be childish to talk of 'Totemism' in North America, 'Kobongism' in Australia, 'Pacarissaism' in the realm of the Incas: totems, kobongs, and pacarissas all amounting to the same thing, except in one point.
That there are, and have been, mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved by Prof. The same name occurs in Judah. Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult.
In every such case it is necessary to inquire whether the feature in question is a universal or general accompaniment of clan alliance, and whether it is peculiar to the latter or is found in other systems also. It is pointed out above that totemism and exogamy are mutually independent arrangements, differing in function and origin, each being found without the other.
McLennan gives but an indefinite answer to the essential question How did the worship of animals and plants arise? Indeed, in his concluding paper, he expressly leaves this problem unsolved; saying that his "is not an hypothesis explanatory of the origin of Totemism, be it remembered, but an hypothesis explanatory of the animal and plant worship of the ancient nations."
Such dream experiences are then the VERA CAUSA of the inception of faith in individual totems among the peoples in which totemism is most highly developed; and among the tribes of Sarawak we find cases which illustrate how a similar faith, strengthened by further dreams and by the good fortune of its possessor, may spread to all the members of his family or of his household and to his descendants, until in some cases the guardian animal becomes almost, though not quite, a clan-totem.
The evidence from exogamy: the law which forbids marriage between persons of the same family name. The evidence from totemism that is, the derivation of the family name and crest or badge, from some natural object, plant or animal. Persons bearing the name may not intermarry, nor, as a rule, may they eat the object from which they derive their family name and from which they claim to be descended.
+541+. It thus appears that several lines of social progress have proved unfavorable to totemism, and to these movements it has generally succumbed. Its home has been, and is, in isolated hunting communities; agriculture and social intercourse have been fatal to it as to all early forms of society based on a belief in kinship with nonhuman natural objects.
Challis developed his study more particularly with reference to the earlier evolution of Totemism, and he was able by his patient work among the Polynesians of Tikopia and Ontong Java, and his comparisons of those sporadic tribes with the Papuasians of Eastern New Guinea, to correct some of the inferences with regard to the origins of exogamy made by Dr.
The first is animal-worship, a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and of perplexing import. Mr. McLennan has shown that much at least of the widespread worship of animals is to be traced to an early totem-stage of society, when animals were held sacred as the ancestors of men. In the second place, totemism explains the view taken in the early world of the nature of religious fellowship.
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