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Updated: May 1, 2025
Animal attributes and symbols and names in religion are not necessarily totemistic. Mr. Max Muller asks if 'any Egyptologists have adopted' the totem theory. He is apparently oblivious of Professor Sayce's reference to a prehistoric age, 'when the religious creed of Egypt was still totemism. Dr. 'Clan Chattan, with its cat crest, may be based, not on a totem, but on a popular etymology.
As our review of what may be called totemistic features shows, the one permanent element in the relation between men and nonhuman, nondivine objects is reverence for these last on men's part; and the conception of an alliance, defensive and offensive, between the two groups has been proposed above as an additional differentia of totemism, a sense of kinship being involved.
Max Muller had conceivably misapprehended Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of totems. Then came into my mind the words of Professor Tiele, 'Beware of weak brethren' such as Herr Lippert seems, as far as this definition is concerned, to be. Nobody knows the origin of totemism. We find no race on its way to becoming totemistic, though we find several in the way of ceasing to be so.
We found her resident in heaven, we found her worshipped, we found her as the totem of a clan. The totemistic stories are widely spread, so widely, indeed, as to afford a presumption that we have in them a clue to the whole meaning of the myth.
These ideas and customs are not the ideas natural to men organised in the patriarchal family. The second question now arises: Can we infer from survivals of totemism among Aryans that these Aryans had once been organised on the full totemistic principle, probably with polyandry, and certainly with female descent?
The meaning of these carvings is quite obscure to the natives, and they answer questions in a very vague way, so that it is probable that totemistic ideas are dying out in the New Hebrides. Most of the statues are meant to represent an ancestor.
Hence arose a riot. The antipathy of the Jews to pork has given rise to quite different explanations. The custom is probably a relic of totemistic belief. That the unclean animals animals not to be eaten such as the pig, the mouse, and the weasel, were originally totems of the children of Israel, Professor Robertson Smith believes is shown by various passages in the Old Testament.
Zeus, the Heavenly Father, of course appears times without number in the same contradictory aspect. But such anecdotes are either not common, or are not frequently reported, in the faiths of the most archaic of known races. Much more frequently we find the totemistic conception.
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.
Free dealing with totems is illustrated by the adoption of a new cooking-pot as totem by one clan. The cult of the python obtains here, as in West Africa. +512+. In West Africa also definite totemistic organization has not been found. Here and there occurs belief in the reincarnation of deceased human beings in animals.
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