The time may come when the desire to give a reason for an emotion will be recognised as one of the greatest factors in myth-making. The Totemist thinks that he spares his Totem because it is his Totem. But man is glad to find an excuse for sparing something. Altruism is as old as the day when the first bird took a succulent berry to its mate or young ones instead of eating it. Where men see no difference between themselves and animals, what more natural than that they should wish to spare them? When it was found difficult or impossible to spare all, it was a katharsis of the wider sentiment to spare one, and Totemism gave a very good excuse. It appealed to a universal instinct. This is not the same as to say that it had its origin in keeping pets; it would be nearer the truth to describe the love of pets as a later birth of the same instinctive tendency which the Totemist follows when he cherishes and preserves his Totem.
The primitive man is a child in the vast zoological garden of Nature; a child with a heart full of love, curiosity and respect, anxious to make friends with the lion which looks so very kind and the white bear who must want some one to comfort him. The whole folk-lore of the world bears witness to this temper, even leaving Totemism out of the question.
The Bechuanas make excuses to the lion before killing him, the Malays to the tiger, the Red Indians to the bear—he says that his children are hungry and need food—would the bear kindly not object to be killed? Some writers see Totemism in all this, and so it may be, but there is something in it deeper than even Totemism—there is human nature.
Take the robin—has any one said it was a Totem? Yet Mrs. Somerville declared she would as soon eat a child as a robin, a thoroughly Totemist sentiment. A whole body of protective superstition has crystallised around certain creatures which, because of their confiding nature, their charming ways, their welcome appearance at particular seasons, inspired man with an unusually strong impulse to spare them. I was interested to find the stork as sacred to the Arabs in Tunis and Algeria as he is to his German friends in the North. A Frenchman remarked that “sacred birds are never good to eat,” but he might have remembered the goose and hen of the ancient Bretons which Cæsar tells us were kept “for pleasure” but never killed; not to speak of the pigeons of Moscow and of Mecca.
It should be observed how quickly the spared or cherished bird or beast becomes “lucky.” In Germany and Scandinavia it is lucky to have a stork’s nest on the roof. The regimental goat is the “luck of his company.”
M. S. Reinach’s opinion that in Totemism is to be found the secret of the domestication of animals offers an attractive solution to that great problem, but it has not been, nor do I think that it will ever be, generally accepted. It, is however, plain, that where population is sparse, and dogs and guns undreamt of, wild animals would be far less wild than in countries with all the advantages of civilisation; the tameness of birds on lonely islands when the explorer first makes his descent is a case in point. No doubt, therefore, with the encouragement they received, the animal Totems acquired a considerable degree of tameness, but from that to domestication there is a long step. Our household “Totem,” the robin, is relatively tame; he will even eat crumbs on the breakfast-table, but he flies away in springtime and we see him no more.
Besides being a social institution and a friendly bond between man and beast, Totemism is an attempt to explain the universe. Its spiritual vitality depends on the widely rooted belief in archetypes; the things seen are the mirror of the things unseen, the material is unreal, the immaterial the only reality. We are ourselves but cages of immortal birds. The real “I” is somewhere else; it may be in a fish, as in the Indian folk-tale, or it may be in a god. I do not know, by the by, if it has been remarked that a man can be a Totem: the incarnation of the indwelling race-spirit. The Emperor of Japan corresponds exactly to this description. The deified Cæsar was a Totem. A god can be a Totem: among the Hidery (islanders of the North Pacific whose interesting legends were published by the Chicago Folk-lore Association) the raven, which is their Totem, is the manifestation of the god Ne-kilst-lass who created the world. Here Totemism approaches till it touches Egyptian zoomorphism. Was this form an earlier or a later development than that in which the Totem is merely an ancestor? Our inability to reply shows our real want of certainty as to whether Totemism is a body of belief in a state of becoming or in a state of dissolution.
Photo: Egypt Exploration Fund.
HATHOR COW.
Cairo Museum.
(Found in 1906 by Dr. E. Naville at Deir-el-bahari.)
We do know that Egyptian zoomorphism is not old, at least in the exaggerated shape it assumed in the worship of the bull Apis. It is a cult which owed its success to the animistic tendency of the human mind, but its particular cause is to be looked for in crystallised figurative language. The stupendous marble tombs of the sacred bulls that seem to overpower us in the semi-obscurity of the Serapeum remind one of how easy it is to draw false conclusions relative to the past if we possess only half-lights upon it: had Egyptian hieroglyphics never yielded up their secret we might have judged the faith of Egypt to have been the most material, instead of one of the most spiritual of religions.