ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM
The making of the local tribe of savagery—Earliest known stage of society—Result of complex processes—Elaborate tribal rules—Laws altered deliberately: sometimes borrowed—Existing legislative methods of savages not primitive—The tribe a gradual conquest of culture—The tribe a combination of small pre-tribal kinships—History of progress towards the tribe traceable in surviving institutions—From passion to Law—Rudeness of native culture in Australia—Varieties of social organisation there—I. Tribes with two phratries, totems, female descent—Tribes of this organisation differ as to ceremonies and beliefs—Some beliefs tend to polytheism: others towards monotheism—Some tribes of pristine organisation have totemic magic and pirrauru: others have not—The more northern tribes of pristine organisation share the ceremonies and beliefs of central tribes: not so the south-eastern tribes—Second form (a) of social organisation has male descent—Second form (b) has female descent plus "matrimonial classes"—Account of these—Eight-class system—The Arunta nation—Their peculiar form of belief in reincarnation—Churinga nanja—Recapitulation—The Euahlayi tribe.
The question of the origin of totemism has more than the merely curious or antiquarian interest of an historic or prehistoric mystery. In the course of the inquiry we may be able to discern and discriminate the relative contributions of unreflecting passion, on one hand, and of deliberate reason, on the other, to the structure of the earliest extant form of human society. That form is the savage local tribe, as known to us in America and in Australia.
Men live in united local communities, relatively large, and carefully regimented, before they have learned to domesticate animals, or to obey chiefs, or to practise the rudest form of agriculture, or to fashion clay into pottery, or to build permanent hovels. Customary law is older than any of these things, and the most ancient law which we can observe unites a tribe by that system of marriages which expresses itself in totemism.
It is plain that the processes of evolution which have resulted in the most backward societies known to us, must have been very complex. If we reflect that the society of the Australian aborigines presents the institution of local tribes, each living peacefully, except for occasional internal squabbles, in a large definite tract of country; cultivating, on the whole, friendly relations with similar and similarly organised tribes; while obeying a most elaborate system of rules, it is obvious that these social conditions must be very remote from the absolutely primitive.[1] The rules of these tribes regulate every detail of private life with a minuteness and a rigour that remind us of what the Scottish Cavalier (1652) protested against as "the bloody and barbarous inconveniences of Presbyterial Government." Yet the tribes have neither presbyters, nor priests, nor kings. Their body of customary law, so copious and complex that, to the European, it seems as puzzling as algebra is to the savage, has been evolved, after a certain early point, by the slow secular action of "collective wisdom." We shall find that on this point, early deliberate modification of law, there can be no doubt.
The recent personal researches of Mr. Howitt and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen make it certain that tribal affairs, now, among many tribes at least, are discussed with the utmost deliberation, and that modifications of institutions may be canvassed, adopted, or rejected, on the initiative of seniors, local "Headmen," and medicine men.[2] It is also certain that tribe borrows from tribe, in the matter of songs, dances, and institutions, while members of one tribe are permitted to be present at the sacred ceremonials of others, especially when these tribes are on intermarrying terms.[3] In such cases, the ceremonials of one tribe may affect those of another, the Arunta may influence the Urabunna, who borrow their sacred objects or churinga for use in their own rites. We even hear of cases in which native religious ideas have been propagated by missionaries sent from tribe to tribe.[4]
Thus, conservative as is the savage by nature, he is distinctly capable of deliberate modification of his rites, ceremonies, and customary laws, and of interchanging ideas on these subjects with neighbouring tribes.
All this is true, to-day, and doubtless has long been true.