Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
Finally, there are traces, in the early history of the ancient civilized peoples, of the form of social organization with which savage totemism is found associated. +518+. It is possible that such facts as these may point to a primitive totemistic stage of ancient civilized society. They occur in lower tribes in cases where totemism does not exist.
Not only does the existence of mythology in Australia indicate that the gods who figure in the myths were once worshipped, though worship now no longer is rendered to them; but the totemistic ceremonies by their very nature show that they are a later development of the sacrificial rite.
The question whether they represent germinal or decadent totemism, or neither, must be considered separately in every case. +467+. The two great totemistic regions of the world are Australia and North America, and in each of these the variations of custom run through the gamut of possible differences.
A negro fetish, becoming intimately associated with a clan, sometimes resembles a totem. The half-civilized Ashanti, Dahomi, and Yoruba have elaborate theistic systems, with monarchical governments that leave no place for a totemistic organization. +513+. Madagascar, before it came under European control, had a well-defined religious and political hierarchy.
These have done, and still do, great harm by substituting irrational for rational rules of conduct. +612+. In many of the cases cited above and in many totemistic regulations there are prohibitions of particular sorts of food. Such prohibitions, very numerous, are found in all grades of civilization.
If traces of such a belief existed, they have been sloughed off. Thus Mr. Frazer's explanation of Greek pigs and bulls and all their odd rites, as connected with the beast in which the corn-spirit is incarnate, holds its ground better than my totemistic suggestion.
A single instance of clan action has been found among the East African Baganda the women of the Grasshopper clan undertake to increase the supply of their totem; why this duty is assigned to the women is not clear the custom appears to involve a relaxation of totemistic rules. The economic festivals and "dances" of the Siouan Mandans and Hidatsa are general tribal ceremonies.
We see this in many degrees and forms, from the original totemistic belief in descent from animals that are also gods to the vaguest remnants of the habit of interpreting national interests as guarded by divine powers that we often see in the language of practical statesmen. The doctrine of the divine rights of kings of course had its origin in that of divine descent.
We are conscious of presumption in venturing to adopt the view that the conception of a beneficent Supreme Being may possibly be neither the end nor the beginning of religion, neither the final result of an evolution, euhemeristic, totemistic, or other, prolonged through countless ages and generations, nor part of the stock-in-trade of primitive man mysteriously acquired.
There is hardly a department of life or a duty which men owe to their dead which does not enter the domain of caste legislation somewhere or other. A strange and very interesting peculiarity of certain castes is their totemistic aspect. This characteristic has only recently been discovered.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking