Ti-ra-wa is Hau-ars, 'a contraction of the word meaning father.' The song is used to still children who cry at a religious ceremony.
However it be, the Omaha prays to Wa-kon-da, not for 'any particular thing,' but for whatever, in the gift of Wa-kon-da, is good, and mainly for a manitu ('personal totem'). The Omaha also believe in telepathy. 'Thought and will can be projected to help a friend.' A magical society exists, to concentrate and direct this expenditure of energy, and the process is strengthened by such things as the neophyte beholds in vision, after prayer to Wa-kon-da. He sent an answer to prayer, a feather of a bird, a tuft of a beast's hair, a crystal, a black stone, representing the species, or element of nature, which was to be the neophyte's 'personal totem,' or manitu. If it were thunder, the man could control the elements; if it were an eagle, he had an eagle eye for the future; if it were a bear (or a badger), he was not so gifted.
Now, according to Miss Fletcher, the Bear Magical Society is composed of men, who, after prayer, have seen the bear in dream or vision; those who saw representatives 'of thunder or water beings' form the Society which deals with the weather. 'The membership came from every kinship group' (totem kin) 'in the tribe.' Thus the Magical Societies are composed of men of any totem, and, the less purely totemic the tribe, the stronger is the Magical Society.
The totem kins now, among the Omaha, have descent in the male line. All this is 'late,' and 'late' is the totem priesthood held by 'hereditary chiefs of the gens.' Miss Fletcher regards the totem of the 'gens,' with the beliefs crystallised around it, as an ingenious 'expedient,' with a social 'purpose!' the totem of each kindred having been inherited from the vision and manitu of some ancestral chief. We need not again point out that, even now, among the Omaha, advanced as they are, manitus are not hereditable, and that Miss Fletcher's system cannot account for Totemism in tribes which reckon descent on the spindle side. Miss Fletcher justly remarks that the real totem, 'the gentile totem,' 'gave no immediate hold upon the supernatural, as did the individual totem' (manitu) 'to its possessor. It served solely as a mark of kinship, and its connection with the supernatural was manifest only in its punishment of the violation of tabu.'
In brief, the real totem, and the individual manitu, with its magical societies, are two things totally apart, and apart we must keep them, in our studies of early society. Not to do so is to make the topic incomprehensible.
TOTEM SURVIVALS
In other books, especially in Myth, Ritual, and Religion, and Custom and Myth, I have examined apparent survivals of Totemism, in ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, and other civilised countries. Of these the most notable are the Greek myths of descent of families from animals, explained as the temporary vehicles of Zeus or Apollo: and the worship of special animals by each of the Nomes of Egypt. Other arguments I have offered, especially in the case of Apollo and the Shrew Mouse. I remain of the opinion that many of the Greek mythical and religious phenomena noted, are most probably to be explained as survivals of a totemic past. Of course Totemism is only one element in animal worship, and the Corn Spirit, disguised as almost any animal you please, may be one of the other elements. But, as far as I have studied the subject, I agree with Mr. Tylor in his 'protest against the manner in which totems have been placed almost at the foundation of religion. Totemism ... has been exaggerated out of proportion to its real theological magnitude.... The rise and growth of ideas of deity, a branch of knowledge requiring the largest range of information and the greatest care in inference, cannot, I hold, be judged on the basis of a section of theology of secondary importance—namely, animal worship—much less of a special section of that—namely, the association of a species of animals (and of a vast variety of other things) 'with a clan of men which results in Totemism. A theoretical structure has been raised quite too wide and high for such a foundation.'[31] The totem god himself I regard as only the hypothesis by which certain barbaric races account to themselves for the survivals of Totemism among them. The so-called 'totem sacrament' is not 'god-eating,' but a piece of magic, used in ceremonies designed to foster—or to vex and annoy—the totem. As Mr. Tylor writes, 'till the totem sacrament is vouched for by some more real proof, it had better fall out of speculative theology.'
DID THE ANCESTORS OF THE CIVILISED RACES PASS THROUGH THE AUSTRALIAN STAGE?
That the ancestors of the Aryan-speaking peoples passed through the 'stone age' of culture, few will deny. That they also passed through the totemic stage as regards marriage law is, however, a problem perhaps not to be solved. For reasons unknown, the 'white' races (not to speak of Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, and Japanese) have a peculiar aptitude for civilisation, are peculiarly accessible to ideas. It might therefore be argued that conceivably they were readily accessible to the idea of blood kinship. The maternal affection, in a race whose children (unlike the offspring of the lower animals) are so long in attaining maturity, cannot but suggest the idea of blood kinship. Among totemic peoples it seems that this idea was originally defined by the totem name, a definition at once too wide and too narrow. It is not physically unthinkable that our own ancestors may have been more acutely intelligent, and, if so, why should not they simply forbid unions between persons too near akin in blood? We have found no such moral or instinctive reason among totemic peoples who were, apparently, led to exogamy, first by non-moral causes, or causes in which the moral element was not explicit, and then, by aid of corollaries from rules thus based, came to forbid marriages of 'too near flesh.' Without the training of totemic institutions, it is hard to see how the Aryan-speaking peoples (however naturally gifted from the first) arrived at the same conception of incest. It seems absurd to suppose that black men and red men arrived at the idea of incest, and at the laws which prohibit it, by the devious and unpromising path of Totemism, while white men reached the same point in some other way. Yet if it has appeared difficult to find traces of Totemism among the Melanesians, much more difficult must it be to prove that races with so long a civilised history as, for example, the Greeks, were once under totemic institutions.