The Secret of the Totem

by Andrew Lang

But they do deny that the intercourse of the sexes is the cause of birth of children. Here the interesting point is that tribes much more primitive, the south-eastern tribes, with female reckoning of descent, inheritance in the female line, and no hereditary local moderatorships, are perfectly well aware of all that the more advanced Arunta do not know. Yet they, quite as much as the Arunta, are subject to the causes which, according to Mr. Frazer, produce the Arunta nescience of the facts of procreation. That nescience, says Mr. Frazer, "may be explained easily enough from the habits and modes of thought of savage men." Thus, "first, the sexual act precedes the first symptoms of pregnancy by a considerable interval." Je n'en vois pas la nécessité. Secondly, savage tribes "allow unrestricted licence of intercourse between the sexes under puberty," and thus "familiarise him" (the savage) "with sexual unions that are necessarily sterile; from which he may not unnaturally conclude that the intercourse of the sexes has nothing to do with the birth of offspring." The savage, therefore, explains the arrival of children (at least the Arunta does) by the entrance of a discarnate ancestral spirit into the woman.

The conspicuous and closing objection to this theory is, that savages who are at least as familiar as the Arunta with (1) the alleged remoteness in time of the sexual act from the appearance of the first symptoms of pregnancy (among them, such an act and the symptoms may be synchronous), and (2) with licence before puberty, are not in the Arunta state of ignorance. They are under no illusions on these interesting points.

The tribes of social organisation much more primitive than that of the Arunta, the south-eastern tribes, as a rule, know all about the matter. Mr. Howitt says, "these" (south-eastern) "aborigines, even while counting descent—that is, counting the class names—through the mother, never for a moment feel any doubt, according to my experience, that the children originate solely from the male parent, and only owe their infantine nurture to their mother."[3] Mr. Howitt also quotes "the remark made to me in several cases, that a woman is only a nurse who takes care of a man's children for him."[4]

Here, then, we have very low savages among whom the causes of savage ignorance of procreation, as explained by Mr. Frazer, are present, but who, far from being ignorant, take the line of Athene in the Eumenides of Æschylus. I give Mr. Raley's translation of the passage:—

"The parent of that which is called her child is not really the mother of it, she is but the nurse of the newly conceived fœtus. It is the male who is the author of its being, while she, as a stranger for a stranger (i.e. no blood relation), preserves the young plant...."—Eumenides, 628-631.

These south-eastern tribes, far more primitive than the Arunta in their ceremonials, and in their social organisation, do not entertain that dominant factor in Aruntadom, the belief in the perpetual reincarnation of the souls of the mythical ancestors of the Alcheringa. That belief is a philosophy far from primitive. As each child is, in Arunta opinion, a being who has existed from the beginning of things, he is not, he cannot be, a creature of man's begetting. Sexual acts, say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, only, at most, "prepare" a woman for the reception of a child—who is as old as the world! If the Arunta were experimental philosophers, and locked a girl up in Danae's tower, so that she was never "prepared," they would, perhaps, be surprised if she gave birth to a child.

However that may be, the Arunta nescience about reproduction is not caused by the facts which, according to Mr. Frazer, are common to them with other savages. These facts produce no nescience among the more primitive tribes with female descent, simply because these primitive tribes do not share the far from primitive Arunta philosophy of eternal reincarnation. If the Arunta deny the fact of procreation among the lower animals, that is because "the man and his totem are practically indistinguishable," as Mr. Frazer says. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

The proof of Arunta primitiveness, the only proof, has been their nescience of the facts of generation. But we have demonstrated that, where Mr. Frazer's alleged causes of that nescience are present, among the south-eastern tribes, they do not produce it; while among the Arunta, it is caused by their system of philosophy, which the south-eastern tribes do not possess.

Mr. Frazer next applies his idea to the evolution of a new theory of the Origin of Totemism. Among the Arunta, as we know, each region has its local centre of totemic spirits awaiting reincarnation, one totem for each region. These centres, Oknanikilla, are, in myth, and for all that I know, in fact, burial-places of the primal ancestors, and in each is one, or there may be more, Nanja trees or rocks, permanently haunted by ancestral spirits, all of the same totem, whose stone amulets, churinga nanja, are lying in or on the ground. When a woman feels a living child's part in her being, she knows that it is a spirit of an ancestor of the local totem, haunting the Nanja, and that totem is allotted to the child when born.

Mr. Frazer from these known facts, deduces thus his new theory of the Origin of Totemism. It is best to give it in his own words:[5]—