Such are the various myths of the Dieri. Another myth attributes exogamy to a moral reformatory movement, which, of course, could only be imagined by men living under exogamy already.
In other cases, as in America among the north-western peoples, a myth of ancestral friendship with the totem animal is narrated. That myth is conditioned by the prevailing animistic belief that a man's soul is reincarnated in a man, a beast's, in a beast, though some tribes hold that a soul always incarnates itself in but one species. The Arunta myth is that semi-bestial forms became human, and that the souls of these totem ancestors are reincarnated in human children. As a rule, the totem, being explained in myth as a direct ancestor of the totemist, or a kinsman, or as the animal out of which he was evolved, receives such consideration as ancestral spirits, where they have a cult, obtain,... more or less religious. All these facts are universally known. There is here no conjecture. I do not need to guess that such more or less religious myths of the origin of the connection between totem and totemist would probably be evolved. They actually were evolved, and a large collection of them may be found in Mr. Frazer's Totemism.
In but one case known to me, a non-religious and thoroughly natural cause of the totem name is given. Two totem kins are said to be so called "from having, in former times, principally subsisted on a small fish, and a very small opossum." These are but two out of seven kins, in one Australian tribe. In the other five cases the totem kins, according to the myth, are descended from their totem animals, and, of course, owe to them, in each case, friendly kinship and regard.[51]
Enfin, it suffices for me to record all the known facts of totemic tabu and practice, in Australia, and, as long as I give them, it matters very little whether I call them "religious" or not. They certainly are on the frontiers of religion: it is more important to explain their evolution than to dispute about the meaning of a term, "religion," which every one defines as he pleases. To the evolution of totemic marriage rules out of a certain belief as to the name-giving animals of groups, we next turn.
So far we have reached these results: we guess that for the sake of distinction groups gave each other animal and plant names. These became stereotyped, we conjecture, and their origin was forgotten. The belief that there must necessarily be some connection between animals and men of the same names led to speculation about the nature of the connection. The usual reply to the question was that the men and animals of the same names were akin by blood. That kinship, with animals, being peculiarly mysterious, was peculiarly sacred. From these ideas arose tabus, and among others, that of totemic exogamy.
The nature and origin of the supposed connection or rapport between each human group and its name-giving animal is thus explained in a way consistent with universally recognised savage modes of thinking, and with the ordinary process by which collective names, even in modern times, are given from without. Dr. Pikler, Major Powell, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Lord Avebury, Mr. Howitt, and others have recognised that the names are the germ of totemism. But both Mr. Herbert Spencer and Lord Avebury appear to think that the name Eagle Hawk or Crow, or Wolf or Raven, was originally that of a male ancestor, who founded a clan that inherited his name. Thus a given Donald, of the Islay family, marrying a MacHenry heiress, gave the name "MacDonald" to the MacHenrys of Glencoe. But this theory is impossible, as we must repeat, in conditions of inheriting names through women, and such were the conditions under which totemism arose. The animal name, now totemic, from the first was a group name, as Mr. Fison argued long ago. "The Australian divisions show that the totem is, in the first place, the badge of a group, not of an individual.... And even if it were first given to an individual, his family, i.e. his children, could not inherit it from him."[52] These are words of gold.
[1] Darwin, Descent of Man, it pp. 361-363. 1871.
[2] I do not extend conjecture to a period when "our human or half-human ancestors" may hare had a rutting season, like stags. Cf. Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 27, 28.
[3] Here I cannot but remark on the almost insuperable difficulty of getting savants to understand an unfamiliar idea. M. Salomon Reinach writes, "Another theory (Atkinson, Letourneau) explains exogamy as the result of the sexual jealousy of the male, chief of the primitive group. (Cf. L'Année Sociologique, 1904, pp. 407, 434.) He is supposed to have tabooed all the women of the clan, reserving them for himself. This conception of a chief not only polygamous but omnigamous" (pasigamous must be meant!) "is founded on no known ethnological fact." (Cultes, Mythes et Religions, i. 161, Note I, 1905.) Mr. Atkinson does not speak of a "clan" at all. The "clan," in French, American, and some English anthropologists' terminology, is a totem kin with exogamy and female reckoning of descent. Mr. Atkinson speaks, in the first instance, of "family groups," "the cyclopean family," and a sire with his female mates and children. Such a sire is no more and no less "omnigamous" than a Turk in his harem, except that, as his condition is "semi-brutish," his daughters (as in Panama, in 1699) are not tabooed to him. Ethnology cannot now find this state of things of course; it is a theory of Mr. Darwin's, based on the known habits of the higher mammals.