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All this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial of the laws of growth. It belongs anthropologically with totemism, sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every other remnant of the terrible shackles of use and wont which chained early man to his past. It is Egyptian. Its high priests are sometimes learned but their minds are frozen. Beware of them.
Totemism is not essentially religious if religion be held to involve worship of superhuman or extrahuman beings; it has, however, in many cases coalesced with religious practices and ideas, and it is sometimes difficult to draw the line distinctly between it and religion proper.
Similarly with the Arabs, where one woman was the wife of several men, the custom was either for the woman to decide to which of them the child was to belong, or the child was assigned by an expert to one of the joint husbands to be regarded as his own. McLennan, The Patriarchal Theory. Survey of Canada, Report for 1878-79, 134 B. Cited by Frazer, Totemism, p. 76. Turner, Samoa, p. 78.
Spencer and Gillen cannot find a trace of it in more than one of the central and northern tribes, which have male kinship, and a kind of local self-government. On the other hand, it does occur among southern tribes, like the Kurnai, which have advanced almost altogether out of totemism.
Many a victim has found to his cost what it meant to disregard this warning. They are exhaustively discussed by Dr. Tylor in "Primitive Culture," Sir John Lubbock in "The Origin of Civilization," Mr. Andrew Lang in "Myth Ritual and Religion," and some of them by Mr. J. G. Frazer in "Totemism," and more recently in "The Golden Bough," published since these pages were written.
According to the latest investigations totemism is not to be regarded as itself a religion; the totem being regarded not as a superior but as an equal. Its influence on the early growth of religion, however, was great, and widely ramified. From this two important consequences follow which will meet us again and again in our study of the great religions.
The non-Aryan tribes of India have been so long in contact with Aryan civilization that in many cases, as it seems, their original customs have been obscured, but at present among such agricultural tribes as the Hos, the Santhals, and the Khonds of Bengal, and some others, totemic organizations are not prominent, and the Todas, with their buffalo-cult, show no signs of totemism.
Where usages like exogamy occur, or where there is reverence for an object, without belief in a definite, nontheistic relation between a human clan and a nonhuman object, we cannot recognize totemism proper; such usages must be treated as belonging to man's general attitude toward his nonhuman associates.
Thus local exogamy may have superseded clan exogamy in many places, the former representing the more settled habit of life, and the absence of the totemic constitution may indicate a process of decay of totemism. No general rule for the decision of the question can be laid down every case must be judged for itself.
Moreover, tribes in the stage of thought here described, hold themselves to be actually descended from material objects often the most diverse from human form. Such mythic ancestors are worshipped as divine. This superstition is called Totemism, and the mythic ancestor is known as the Totem.
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