As to the precise original meaning and form of the word usually written 'totem'—whether it should be 'totam,' or 'toodaim,' or 'dodaim,' or 'ododam,' or 'ote,' philologists may dispute.[9] They may question whether the word means 'mark,' or 'family,' or 'tribe,' or clay for painting the family mark.[10] When we here use the word 'totem' we mean, at all events, the object which gives its name to a group of savage kindred, who may not marry within this hereditary name. In place of 'totem' we might use the equivalent murdu of the Dieri, or gaura of the Kunundaburi.[11]
THE TOTEM 'CULT'
The 'cult,' if it deserves to be called a 'cult,' of the totem, among savages, is not confined to abstention from marriage within the name. Each kin usually abstains from killing, eating, or in any way using its totem (except in occasional ceremonies, religious or magical), is apt to claim i descent from or kindred with it, or alternations of metamorphosis into or out of it, and sometimes uses its effigy on memorial pillars, on posts carved with a kind of genealogical tree, or tattoos or paints or scarifies it on the skin—in different cases and places.
To what extent the blood-feud is taken up by all members of the slain man's totem, I am not fully aware: it varies in different regions. The eating or slaying of the totem, by a person of the totem name, is in places believed to be punished by disease or death, a point which the late Mr. J. J. Atkinson observed among the natives of New Caledonia (MS. penes me). Mr. Atkinson happened to be conversing with some natives on questions of anthropology, when his servant brought in a lizard which he had killed. On this one of the natives exhibited great distress, saying, 'Why have you killed my father? we were talking of my father, and he came to us' The son (his name was Jericha) then wrapped the dead lizard up in leaves, and reverently laid the body in the bush. This was not a case like that of the Zulu Idhlozi, the serpents that haunt houses, and are believed to be the vehicles of the souls of dead kinsfolk. The other natives present had for their 'father,' one, a mouse, the other a pigeon, and so on. If any one ate his animal 'father,' sores broke out on him, and Mr. Atkinson was shown a woman thus afflicted, for having eaten her 'father.' But I do not find, in his papers, that a man with a mouse for father might not marry a woman of the mouse set, nor have I elsewhere been able to ascertain what is New-Caledonian practice on this point.[12] When Mr. Atkinson made these observations (1874), he had only heard of totems in the novels of Cooper and other romancers.
'TOTEM GODS'
This example is here cited because, as far as I am aware, no other anthropologist has observed this amount of Totemism in New Caledonia. Students are divided into those who have a bias in favour of finding totemism everywhere; and those who aver, with unconcealed delight, that in this or the other place there are no totems. Such negative statements must always be received with caution. An European may live long among savages before he really knows them; and, without possessing totemism in full measure, many races retain obvious fragments of the institution.
Mr. Tylor has censured the use of the terms 'totems' and 'totem clans' with respect to the Fijians and Samoans, where certain animals, not to be eaten, are believed to be vehicles or shrines of certain gods. It is a very probable conjecture (so probable, I think, as almost to amount to a certainty), that the creatures which are now the shrines of Fijian or Samoan gods of the family, or of higher gods, were once totems in an earlier stage of Samoan and Fijian society and belief. As I have said elsewhere, 'in totemistic countries the totem is respected himself; in Samoa the animal is worshipful because a god abides within him. This appears to be a theory by which the reflective Samoans have explained to themselves what was once pure Totemism.'[13] But I must share in Mr. Tylor's protest against using the name of 'totem' for a plant or animal which is regarded as the shrine of a god. Such thorough totemists as some of the North American Indians, or the Australians, do not explain their totems as the shrines of gods, for they have no such gods to serve as explanations. That myth appears to be the Samoan or Fijian way of accounting for the existence of worshipful and friendly plants and animals.
Thus, at all events, and unluckily, the phrase 'the totem-god' is introduced into our speculations, and the cult of the 'totem-god' is confused with the much more limited respect paid by savages to actual totems. However attractive the theory of 'the totem-god' may be, we cannot speak of 'totems' where a god incarnate in a plant or animal is concerned. Such a deity may be a modified survival of Totemism, but a totem he is not. Moreover, it is hardly safe to say that, in the Samoan case, the god is 'developed from a totem;' we only know that the god has got into suspiciously totemistic society. On the whole, we cannot be too cautious in speaking of totems and Totemism: and we must be specially careful not to exaggerate the more or less religious respect with which totems are, in many cases, regarded. The Australians, as far as they have the idea of a creative being, Baiame, Nooreli, and so forth, do not regard their totems as shrines or incarnations of him. That appears to be the speculation of peoples who, probably by way of animism, and ancestor-worship, are already in the stage of polytheism. Totems, in their earliest known stage, have very little to do with religion, and probably, in origin, had nothing really religious about them.