Nor, further, has the prohibition to slay, injure or eat the Totem in the first place any magical significance; for it merely puts the Totem in the position of a clansman. But the situation, being strange and mysterious, acquires a magical atmosphere; and the enforcement of the taboo by penalties is unmistakably magical. The Untmajera (North Central Australia) have a legend of a Beetle-Grub man of former times who ate beetle-grubs, and thereupon broke out in sores, wasted away and died. Or one’s hair may turn grey; or, according to the Samoan belief (not strictly totemistic), the forbidden food may grow inside one into the whole animal or plant to the destruction of its host. Such beliefs, resting on the analogy of poisons and their physiological consequences, are magical imaginations: the taboo has the same character as a conditional curse.
Similarly, the prohibition of marriage within the Totem-clan, if it originated (as I have supposed) with the fusion of Totemism and Exogamy in the customs of various early groups of men and women, is not based on Magic; but the penalties for breaking the taboo are magical. Thus amongst the Euahlayi and their neighbours men and women of the Iguana clan cannot intermarry, though coming from different parts of the country and without any traceable consanguinity; because, if they did, their children, inasmuch as their ancestors on both sides were the same animal, would “throw back” to the form or attributes of the iguana.[538] A grotesque anticipation of scientific ideas.
But the most remarkable connexion between Totemism and Magic occurs in those rites by which clansmen in several parts of the world, but especially in Australia, believe themselves able to influence their Totems: when these are edible, to multiply them; when noxious, to drive away or destroy them; or, as with the wind and rain, to control them for the general good. Spencer and Gillen[539] give astonishing descriptions of the rites of multiplication (or Intichiuma), carefully prepared and regulated, including disguisings of clansmen in the likeness of the Totems, drawings of the Totems on the ground, dances, incantations and ceremonies, sometimes representing traditional history—by which the tribesmen discharge this function of theirs. They rely chiefly on mimetic (exemplary) Magic which, by dramatising some natural process, brings it into real operation. In identifying themselves with the Totem, they exert their imaginations to the utmost, and to this end may eat a little of the Totem, at other times forbidden. This assumption that by eating a little of any animal, plant or human being, you become one with it, or acquire its qualities, or, further, that two men by eating together of the same food become allied (which is in a manner materially true, but absurdly interpreted), is another of those notions simpler than, and antecedent to, Magic, which provide a base for magical operations.[540] These solemnities last for months, and are carried out with conscientious diligence and earnestness: the infatuation is profound and universal. Here, as at most of the higher stages of culture, we find the most intense emotions of which men are capable excited by participation in communal imaginative exercises that have directly, in relation to their expectations, absolutely no result. Indeed, pre-occupation with vain employments tends to exclude all ideas that might be useful, that might lead (e. g.) to the increasing of food by the cultivation of plants or domestication of animals. Sir James Frazer has pointed out that a passage of the rites of the Grass-seed clan, in which grass-seeds are scattered about upon the ground, might have led to cultivation: but the mental state of the clan is unfavourable to cool observation. As for animals, it is some excuse for the backwardness of Australian culture that the Marsupialia do not comprise a single species that would repay domestication. Indirectly and undesignedly these performances have very useful consequences: they annually restore the unity of the tribe assembled from all parts for the great occasion; promote mutual good-will and a spirit of co-operation, for which they afford the chief opportunity; maintain the social organisation and the tradition of customs by increasing the influence of the Headmen, who have a leading part in everything that happens, and on whose authority all order and discipline depend; interrupt the monotony of savage life with variety of interests; stimulate ingenuity, and fill up the time, that might else be wasted in idleness or quarrelling, with artistic and dramatic recreation.
Upon these rites for the multiplication and control of the Totems, Sir James Frazer based his second hypothesis concerning the origin of Totemism, namely, that it was a system of co-operation amongst sections of a savage tribe for the magical supply of food, etc.: the Emu clan multiplying emus, the Kangaroo clan kangaroos, the Witchety-Grub clan witchety-grubs, and so forth.[541] But he afterwards reflected that such a design was beyond the conception of savages. And, no doubt, as a plan thought out and deliberately adopted as a whole, most ethnologists would consider it above the capacity of Australian aborigines. But if so—though not more difficult than the invention of the Classificatory Marriage System—it shows what complex arrangements, simulating design, may come into existence by the growth of custom; for the clans certainly do co-operate in the magical supply of food.
Whatever may have been the origin of Totemism the institution seems to have been utilised by some tribes in an ambitious attempt to control all nature by grouping (on very obscure principles, if on any) various classes of phenomena with the Totems, so that one clan or another is responsible for everything. Short of this, it is plainly necessary to control the wind, rain, hail and lightning. The control of an animal Totem is not always benevolent toward the animals themselves. In the Kakadu tribe it is the duty of the Mosquito clan to save the rest from mosquitoes; they make imitation mosquitoes, dance and sing, and imagine they are killing them.[542] In North America similar beliefs and practices have been found both for encouraging and for discouraging the Totem, but occasionally and irregularly. The Bird clan of the Omahas, when birds threatened the crops, prevented their devastations by chewing corn and spitting it about over the fields; when mosquitoes were troublesome, the Wind people flapped blankets to raise a wind and blow the pests away; when worms attacked the crops, the Reptile clan (worms and reptiles are confused in primitive Zoology) countermined their approaches by pounding up some of them with a little corn into a soup and eating it.[543] The most remarkable American rites for the increase of food—the Buffalo-dances and Corn-festivals of the Mandans—were not totemic, but carried out by the whole tribe. The buffalo hunting-dance to bring the herd within reach, was continued, if necessary, for weeks—in fact until the animals came; so that the Magic was always effectual.
§ 8. Totemism and Animism
If the unity of clansmen with their Totem is very early conceived of as consisting in having the same, or the same sort of, soul, it is thenceforward essentially animistic. Yet this idea seems only very slowly to have led to any sense of dependence on the Totem as a spiritual power, or to any expectation that it would help or succour the clansmen, or (consequently) to the making of any appeal to it, except by magical coercion. Perhaps the earliest way in which the Totem was supposed to aid its clansmen was by omens; as a Black Duck man of the Yuin tribe (West Australia) thought that black ducks warned him against his enemies; but this is more characteristic of guardian spirits than of Clan-Totems. Occasionally in Australia we meet with something like a prayer to a Totem. On the Tully River (Queensland) we are told by Mr. W. E. Roth that before a man goes to sleep, or on waking in the morning, he utters in a low voice the name of the animal whose name he bears, or which belongs to his group; and that then, if edible, he will be successful in hunting it or, if dangerous, it will not hurt him without warning.
Professor Durkheim has an elaborate theory of the growth of divinities from Totems in Australia, especially in the example of Bungil, the Eagle-Hawk, a great phratry name-animal in several tribes.[544] He is a persuasive writer, but perverse and ingenious. Bungil receives neither prayer nor sacrifice (these, indeed, in the author’s view are not necessary to religion), and there is nothing to show that he differs from the other glorified Headmen who are found in Australia. The most plausible of these superior beings is Byamee of the Euahlayi, who is not a Totem, but the source of Totems, which are derived from different parts of his body. At funerals prayers are addressed to him for the souls of the dead; and, again, at the close of the Boorah (initiation rites) for long life, inasmuch as the tribesmen have kept his law.[545] We are told that the nearest mission-station is a hundred miles off, and recently established; but on reading further that only those who have been initiated can go to Byamee’s sky-camp, and that gross sinners are punished in the next life in Eleanbah Wundah, a place dark but for fires,[546] we cannot help reflecting that missionaries are not the only channels of sound doctrine.
The most authentic example of the rise of a Totem to something like divine rank is the Wollunqua, the great snake of the Warramunga, which differs from other Totems in being not a real animal but a mythological monster. It is not approached with prayer or sacrifice; but is the object of rites in part propitiatory, in part coercive, and is certainly regarded with superstitious awe much as a demon might be. To please the Wollunqua, the clan build a long mound and draw its representation upon it; which, however, afterwards meets with “savage destruction.” On approaching Thapanerlu, the sacred pool where it lives, they whispered to it “to remain quiet and do them no harm.”[547]