Social Origins and Primal Law

by Andrew Lang; J. J. Atkinson

On the whole, Totemism is breaking down, and something very like Polytheism, of an animistic type, is beginning to emerge, in Melanesia. There is a tindalo of the sea, of war, and of gardens,—Poseidon, Ares, and Priapus in the making. Sacrifice and prayer exist, neither is found (perhaps with an exception as regards prayers for the souls of the dead) in Australia. On the other hand, only the smallest of small change for the Australian conception of such makers and judges as Baiame is noted in Melanesia, mainly in the myths of and prayers to Qat, and myths of a creative unworshipped female being. These are Vuis, not ghosts; they are spirits never incarnate, unlike the tindalos.[18] Qat appears to hover between the estate of a lowly creative being, born of a rock, and that of a culture hero, and rather resembles the Zulu Unkulunkulu. Thus Melanesia seems, in society and beliefs, to show an advance from Totemism, nomadic life, and from an unworshipped female creative being, towards Animism and Polytheism, and descent reckoned in the male line: agricultural and settled existence, with mixture of race, and foreign contamination of custom, being marked agents in the developement.

As tindalos (human ghosts, in one case the patron of a kema) thrive to Gods' estate, while butos remain ancestral plants or animals, not to be eaten, it would be a natural step to imagine later that the family God (tindalo) of ghost origin, incarnates himself in the buto, the sacred animal of the kin. That would be an explanatory myth. If accepted, it would produce the Samoan and Fijian belief, that the animals and plants not to be eaten by the kindreds (old totems) are incarnations of gods. Thus the Florida beliefs and customs are a stage between those of Australia and those of Samoa and Fiji.

HOW THE ORIGIN OF TOTEM NAMES WAS FORGOTTEN

It appears, at least to the mind of the maker of an hypothesis, that the names of Melanesian kemas, as well as the new names of American 'gentes' (totem kins with male descent), indicate the probability that, from the first—as among our villagers—group names were given (in the majority of cases) from without, as in many American and some Melanesian cases they certainly are. We see that it is so: no group would call itself 'Cat's Cradle Players,' or 'Eaters of Hide-scrapings,' or 'Bone Pickers,' as in Florida; among the Sioux; and in Western England. We cannot possibly expect to find any groups in the process of becoming totemic and of having plant and animal names given to them from without. But we certainly do observe that names, or nicknames, relatively recent, are given to savage groups, on their way out of Totemism—the totem name often still lingering on in America, like the butos in Melanesia—and that these names, or nicknames, are given from without. Nearer to demonstration that the totem names were given in the same way (as 'Whig' and 'Tory' were given), we cannot expect to come.

It may be said that my conjecture is only a form of that suggested (if I understand him) by Mr. Herbert Spencer. An individual had an animal name or nickname. He died: his ghost was revered by his old name, say Bear. He was forgotten, and his descendants, who kept up his worship, came to think that they were descended from a real bear, and were akin to bears. I need not once more reiterate the objections to this theory, but, like my own suggestion, it involves forgetfulness of a fact,—here the fact that 'Bear' was a human ancestor. Against the chances of this forgetfulness was the circumstance that individuals were constantly being named Bear, Wolf, Eagle, and so on, in daily experience, usually with a qualifying epithet, 'Sitting Bull,' 'Howling Wolf,' and so forth. These facts might have prevented Mr. Spencer's savages from forgetting that the ancestral Bear was a Bear of human kind, like themselves and their contemporaries.

In my hypothesis, forgetfulness, on the other hand, might readily occur. When all the group names in each area had become organised and stereotyped, there would necessarily be no new giving of group names to remind the savages how these titles came into existence. On the other hand the myth-making stage, as to kinship with the name-giving plants and animals, would set in, and then would come reverent behaviour towards these creatures, as if they were kinsmen and friends. Respect for the totem, in each case, will clinch the tendency to group exogamy. I have supposed, for the reasons given, that there was already a tendency against marriage within the group. That tendency must have been confirmed by the totem tabu against making any use of any member of the totem kin, and a woman of the totem would be exempted from marital use by her male fellow-totemists. The totem belief would add a supernormal sanction to the exogamous tendency.

OTHER SOURCES OF SACREDNESS IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS

Now any such superstitious respect for an animal, whatever its origin, will take the same inevitable forms; and thus, if individuals select nyarongs, naguals, and so on, they must necessarily behave to these things as they do to their hereditary totems. There is no other way in which they can behave, if they regard the animals as mysteriously friendly and protective, though the idea that they are friendly and protective has different origins, in either case.

Thus the exigencies of my guess as to the origin of Totemism, compel me to disagree with a dictum of Mr. Frazer, 'if the relations are similar, the explanation which holds good of the one ought equally to hold good of the other.'[19] The conclusion is not necessary. You may revere a rat (your totem), and a cat (your nagual) for quite different reasons, and in quite different capacities, you being the kinsman of your totem, the protégé of your nagual; but, if you revere them, your reverence can only show itself in the same ways. There are no other ways.[20]