[563] Wundt, who has revived the theory of Tylor in its essential lines, has tried to explain this mysterious relationship of the man and the animal in a different way: it was the sight of the corpse in decomposition which suggested the idea. When they saw worms coming out of the body, they thought that the soul was incarnate in them and escaped with them. Worms, and by extension, reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc.), were therefore the first animals to serve as receptacles for the souls of the dead, and consequently they were also the first to be venerated and to play the rôle of totems. It was only subsequently that other animals and plants and even inanimate objects were elevated to the same dignity. But this hypothesis does not have even the shadow of a proof. Wundt affirms (Mythus und Religion, II, p. 296) that reptiles are much more common totems than other animals; from this, he concludes that they are the most primitive. But we cannot see what justifies this assertion, in the support of which the author cites no facts. The lists of totems gathered either in Australia or in America do not show that any special species of animal has played a preponderating rôle. Totems vary from one region to another with the flora and fauna. Moreover, if the circle of possible totems was so closely limited at first, we cannot see how totemism was able to satisfy the fundamental principle which says that the two clans or sub-clans of a tribe must have two different totems.
[564] "Sometimes men adore certain animals," says Tylor, "because they regard them as the reincarnation of the divine souls of the ancestors; this belief is a sort of bridge between the cult rendered to shades and that rendered to animals" (Primitive Culture, II, p. 805, cf. 309, in fine). Likewise, Wundt presents totemism as a section of animalism (II, p. 234).
[565] See above, p. 139.
[566] Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 97 ff.
[567] See above, p. 28.
[568] Jevons recognizes this himself, saying, "It is to be presumed that in the choice of an ally he would prefer ... the kind or species which possessed the greatest power" (p. 101).
[569] 2nd Edition, III, pp. 416 ff.; see especially p. 419, n. 5. In more recent articles, to be analysed below, Frazer exposes a different theory, but one which does not, in his opinion, completely exclude the one in the Golden Bough.
[570] The Origin of the Totemism of the Aborigines of British Columbia, in Proc. and Transact. of the Roy. Soc. of Canada, 2nd series, VII, § 2, pp. 3 ff. Also, Report on the Ethnology of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 141. Hill Tout has replies to various objections made to his theory in Vol. IX of the Transact. of the Roy. Soc. of Canada, pp. 61-99.
[571] Alice C. Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, in Smithsonian Report for 1897, pp. 577-586.
[572] The Kwakiutl Indians, pp. 323 ff., 336-338, 393.