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Updated: May 27, 2025
Totemism, in the specific form that has to do with kinship, means that a social group depends for its identity on a certain intimate and exclusive relation in which it stands towards an animal-kind, or a plant-kind, or, more rarely, a class of inanimate objects, or, very rarely, something that is individual and not a kind or class at all.
Similarly, even today, the orthodox Jew, in case of grave illness in his family, changes the given name of the sufferer. To confuse the evil spirit causing the disease? Further survivals of totemism as found in the Old Testament are illustrated by the worship of the bull and the serpent. The famous golden calf of the Israelites, which was the object of Moses' anger, was a totemic idol.
The service of totemism to society lies in the aid it has given to the friendly association of men in groups. Common social feeling, the perception of the advantage to be gained by combination in the quest for food and for defense against human enemies, originated the formation of groups.
There is considerable variation, however, to be found in the practices and beliefs of a more or less religious kind that are associated with this form of totemism; though almost always there are some. Sometimes the totem is thought of as an ancestor, or as the common fund of life out of which the totemites are born and into which they go back when they die.
Yet the pseudo-science gave birth to the true; as false premisses often lead by bad logic to sound conclusions. Totemism, "a perfectly crazy and degrading belief," says Mr. Lang, "rendered possible nay, inevitable the union of hostile groups into large and relatively peaceful tribal societies.... We should never have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it should have been thus done.
Thirdly, although it may be said that even at the present time many of the features of the religious side of totemism are present, we have not been able to discover any traces of a social organisation based upon totemism.
We cannot tell, of course, on the evidence here, whether 'Big Feet' suggested 'Bear, or vice versa, or neither. But Mr. Frazer has remarked that periphrases for sacred beasts, like 'Big Feet' for Bear, are not uncommon. For all this, Mr. Brinton, 'say that the Indians claim descent from different wild beasts. For evidence I refer to that hasty writer, Mr. Frazer, and his book, Totemism.
What Sir Henry Maine admits as the exception, we are inclined to regard as having, in a very remote past, been the rule. No one kind of evidence neither traces of marriage by capture, of exogamy, of totemism, of tradition, of noted fact among Lycians and Picts and Irish would alone suffice to guide our opinion in this direction.
'The best representatives of anthropology are now engaged not so much in comparing as in discriminating. Why not refer, then, to the results of their discriminating efforts? 'To treat all animal worship as due to totemism is a mistake. Do we make it? Mr. Frazer and Myself There is, or was, a difference of opinion between Mr.
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.
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