The Secret of the Totem

by Andrew Lang

"ULTHAANA

"The sky is said to be inhabited by three persons, a gigantic man with an immense foot shaped like that of an emu, a woman, and a child who never develops beyond childhood. The man is called Ulthaana, meaning 'spirit.' When a native dies his spirit is said to ascend to the home of the great Ulthaana, where it remains for a short time; the Ulthaana then throws it into the Saltwater (sea) [these natives have no personal knowledge of the sea], from whence it is rescued by two benevolent but lesser Ulthaana who perpetually reside on the seashore, apparently merely for the purpose of rescuing spirits who have been subject to the inhospitable treatment of the great Ulthaana of the heavens (alkirra). Henceforth the spirit of the dead man lives with the lesser Ulthaana."[30]

Is it possible that Mr. Gillen's "Great Ulthaana of the Heavens, alkirra," is Kempe's Altjira? Or can he be a native modification of Kempe's own theology? Probably not.

In any case the Arunta of Mr. Gillen who do not believe in reincarnation cannot possibly, it would seem, possess the Arunta form of totemism. It is only natural that varieties of myth and belief should exist, and it is asserted that there is a myth among the Arunta of the extreme south-west section about a sky-dwelling being, who, like the Crow and the Moon of Euahlayi belief, makes spirit children, and places them in the mistletoe boughs. The story that the first man and woman sprang from two of this being's lost churinga, again, is matched by the Kaitish story of two men who rose from churinga. The Arunta described by Mr. Gillen, they whose souls dwell with "the lesser Ulthaana," no more believe in reincarnation than do the south-eastern tribes. These variants in belief and myth usually occur among savages.

The Arunta add to the reincarnation myth, the peculiarity of mortuary local totem-centres, and of the attachment of the spirit to a stone churinga inscribed with the marks of that totem, and from these peculiar ideas—as much isolated as the peculiar ideas of the Urabunna or the Euahlayi—arises the non-exogamous character of Arunta totemism. No one, out of such varying freaks of belief, can be regarded as primitive, more than another, but the Arunta variant, for the reason repeatedly given, cannot possibly be primitive.

The Arunta totems are not only non-exogamous: their actual raison d'être, to-day, is to exist as the objects of magical co-operative societies, fostering the totem plants and animals as articles of tribal food supply. Mr. Spencer thinks this the primary purpose of totem societies, everywhere. Now we have not, as yet, been told why each society took to doing magic for this or that animal or other thing in nature. They cannot have been "charged with" this duty, except by some central authority. As there did not yet exist, by the hypothesis, so much as a tribe with phratries, what can this central authority have been? If it existed, on what principle did it select, out of the horde, groups to become magical societies? Were they groups of kin, or groups of associates by contiguity? On what principle could the choice of departments of nature to be controlled by each group, be determined by the central authority? Had the groups already distinguishing names—Emu, Eagle Hawk, Opossum, &c.—how did these names arise, and did these names determine the department of nature for which each group was allotted to do magic? Or did authority give to each group a magical department, and did the nature of that department determine the group-name, such as Frogs, Grubs, Hakea Trees?

Or was there no formal distribution, no sudden organisation, no central authority? Did a casual knot of men, or a firm of wizards, say, "Let us do magic for the Kangaroo, and get more Kangaroos to eat"? Was their success so great and enviable that other casual knots of men or firms of wizards followed their example? And, in this case, why do Arunta totemists not eat their totems freely? Is it because they think that to do so would frighten the totems, and make them recalcitrant to their magic? But that cannot be the case if their success, while they worked their magic on their own account, was great, enviable, and generally imitated. And, if it was not, why was it imitated? Next, how, among the magical societies, was exogamy introduced? Mr. Spencer writes: "Our knowledge of the natives leads us to the opinion that this really took place; that the exogamic groups were deliberately introduced so as to regulate marital regulations." This was, then, a Marriage Reform Act. However, Mr. Spencer hastens to add that he cannot conceive a motive for the Marriage Reform Act. "We do not mean that the regulations had anything whatever to do with the idea of incest, or of any harm accruing from the union of individuals who were regarded as too nearly related."[31]

We have shown that no such ideas could occur to the supposed promiscuous horde, who knew not that there is such a thing as procreation, but supposed that, like the stars in Caliban's philosophy, children "came otherwise." Yet the "exogamic system" does nothing but prohibit certain marriages, and "it is quite possible that the exogamic groups were deliberately introduced so as to regulate marital relations."[32]

Mr. Spencer's theory is, then, that there was a horde with magical totemic societies, how evolved we cannot guess. Across that came the arrangement of classes to regulate marriage, as it does, but the ancestors who possibly introduced it had, he says, no idea that there was any moral or material harm in unregulated marriages. Then why did they regulate them?

The hypothetical horde of the kind which we have described had no marriage relations, and had no possible reason for regulating intersexual relations.