"Naturally enough, when she is first aware of the mysterious movement within her, the mother fancies that something has that very moment passed into her body, and it is equally natural that in her attempt to ascertain what the thing is she should fix upon some object that happened to be near her and to engage her attention at the critical moment. Thus if she chanced at the time to be watching a kangaroo, or collecting grass-seed for food, or bathing in water, or sitting under a gum-tree, she might imagine that the spirit of a kangaroo, of grass-seed, of water, or of a gum-tree, had passed into her, and accordingly, that when her child was born, it was really a kangaroo, a grass-seed, water, or a gum-tree, though to the bodily eye it presented the outward form of a human being. Amongst the objects on which her fancy might pitch as the cause of her pregnancy we may suppose that the last food she had eaten would often be one. If she had recently partaken of emu flesh or yams she might suppose that the emu or yam, which she had unquestionably taken into her body, had, so to say, struck root and grown up in her. This last, as perhaps the most natural, might be the commonest explanation of pregnancy; and if that was so, we can understand why, among the Central Australian tribes, if not among totemic tribes all over the world, the great majority of totems are edible objects, whether animals or plants.[6] Now, too, we can fully comprehend why people should identify themselves, as totemic tribes commonly do, with their totems, to such an extent as to regard the man and his totem as practically indistinguishable. A man of the emu totem, for example, might say, 'An emu entered into my mother at such and such a place and time; it grew up in her, and came forth from her. I am that emu, therefore I am an emu man. I am practically the same as the bird, though to you, perhaps, I may not look like it.' And so with all the other totems. On such a view it is perfectly natural that a man, deeming himself one of his totem species, should regard it with respect and affection, and that he should imagine himself possessed of a power, such as men of other totems do not possess, to increase or diminish it, according to circumstances, for the good of himself and his fellows. Thus the practice of Intichiuma, that is, magical ceremonies, performed by men of a totem for its increase or diminution, would be a natural development of the original germ or stock of totemism.[7] That germ or stock, if my conjecture is right, is, in its essence, nothing more or less than an early theory of conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species. This theory of conception is, on the principles of savage thought, so simple and obvious that it may well have occurred to men independently in many parts of the world. Thus we could understand the wide prevalence of totemism among distant races without being forced to suppose that they had borrowed it from each other. Further, the hypothesis accounts for one of the most characteristic features of totemism, namely, the intermingling in the same community of men and women of many different totem stocks. For each person's totem would be determined by what may be called an accident, that is, by the place where his mother happened to be, the occupation in which she was engaged, or the last food she had eaten at the time when she first felt the child in her womb; and such accidents (and with them the totems) would vary considerably in individual cases, though the range of variation would necessarily be limited by the number of objects open to the observation, or conceivable by the imagination, of the tribe. These objects would be chiefly the natural features of the district, and the kinds of food on which the community subsisted; but they might quite well include artificial and even imaginary objects, such as boomerangs and mythical beasts. Even a totem like Laughing Boys, which we find among the Arunta, is perfectly intelligible on the present theory. In fact, of all the things which the savage perceives or imagines, there is none which he might not thus convert into a totem, since there is none which might not chance to impress itself on the mind of the mother, waking or dreaming, at the critical season.
"If we may hypothetically assume, as the first stage in the evolution of totemism, a system like the foregoing, based on a primitive theory of conception, the whole history of totemism becomes intelligible. For in the first place, the existing system of totemism among the Arunta and Kaitish, which combines the principle of conception with that of locality, could be derived from this hypothetical system in the simplest and easiest manner, as I shall point out immediately. And in the second place, the existing system of the Arunta and Kaitish could, in its turn, readily pass into hereditary totemism of the ordinary type, as in fact it appears to be doing in the Umbaia and Nani tribes of Central Australia at present. Thus what may be called conceptional totemism pure and simple furnishes an intelligible starting-point for the evolution of totemism in general. In it, after years of sounding, our plummets seem to touch bottom at last."
How the totemic spirits became localised, is, Mr. Frazer says, "matter of conjecture," and he guesses that, after several women had felt the first recognised signs of maternity, "in the same place, and under the same circumstances "—for example, at the moment of seeing a Witchetty Grub, or a Laughing Boy—the site would become an Oknanikilla haunted by spirits of the Laughing Boy or Grub totem.[8] The Arunta view is different; these places are burial-grounds of men all of this or that totem, who have left their churinga nanja there. About these essential parts of the system, Mr. Frazer, as has been observed, says nothing. His theory I do not criticise, as I have already stated my objection to his premises. "The ultimate origin of exogamy ..." he says, "remains a problem nearly as dark as ever," but is a matter of deliberate institution. The tribes, already totemic, but not exogamous, were divided into the two exogamous phratries, and still later into the matrimonial classes, which the most pristine tribes do not possess, though they do know about procreation, while the more advanced Arunta, with classes and loss of phratry names, do not know. In the primitive tribes, with no churinga nanja, the totems became hereditary. Among the advanced Arunta, with churinga nanja, the totems did not (like all other things, including the right to work the paternal totemic ritual), become hereditary, though their rites did, which is curious. Consequently, Mr. Frazer suggests, the Arunta did not redistribute the totems so that one totem never occurs in both exogamous phratries; and totems in the region of churinga nanja alone are not exogamous.
Finally the tribes of Central Australia, which we prove to have the more advanced ceremonial, system of inheritance, local magistracies hereditary in the male line, and the matrimonial classes which Mr. Frazer proclaims to be later than the mere phratries of many south-eastern tribes—"are the more backward, and the coastal tribes the more progressive."[9]
This is a very hard saying!
It seems to rest either on Mr. Frazer's opinion that the south tribes of Queensland, and many on the Upper Murray, Paroo, and Barwan rivers are "coastal" ("which is absurd"), or on a failure to take them into account. For these tribes, the Barkinji, Ta-Ta-Thai, Barinji, and the rest, are the least progressive, and "coastal," of course, they are not.
This apparent failure to take into account the most primitive of all the tribes, those on the Murray, Paroo, Darling, Barwan, and other rivers, and to overlook even the more advanced Kamilaroi, is exhibited by Mr. Howitt, whose example Mr. Frazer copies, in the question of Australian religious beliefs.
I quote a passage from Mr. Howitt, which Mr. Frazer re-states in his own words. He defines "the part of Australia in which a belief exists in an anthropomorphic supernatural being, who lives in the sky, and who is supposed to have some kind of influence on the morals of the natives ... That part of Australia which I have indicated as the habitat of tribes having that belief" (namely, 'certainly the whole of Victoria and of New South Wales up to the eastern boundaries of the tribes of the Darling River') "is also the area where there has been the advance from group marriage to individual marriage, from descent in the female line to that in the male line; where the primitive organisation under the class system has been more or less replaced by an organisation based on locality—in fact, where those advances have been made to which I have more than once drawn attention in this work."[10]
This is an unexpected remark!
Mr. Howitt, in fact, has produced all his examples of tribes with descent in the female line, except the Dieri and Urabunna "nations," from the district which he calls "the habitat of tribes in which there has been advance ... from descent in the female to that in the male line." Apparently all, and certainly most of the south-eastern tribes described by him who have not made that advance, cherish the belief in the sky-dwelling All Father.
I give examples:—