[732] Of course it is to be understood that, as we have already pointed out (see above, p. 155), this choice was not made without a more or less formal agreement between the groups that each should take a different emblem from its neighbours.
[733] The mental state studied in this paragraph is identical to the one called by Lévy-Bruhl the law of participation (Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, pp. 76 ff.). The following pages were written when this work appeared and we publish them without change; we confine ourselves to adding certain explanations showing in what we differ from M. Lévy-Bruhl in our understanding of the facts.
[734] See above, p. 230.
[735] Another cause has contributed much to this fusion; this is the extreme contagiousness of religious forces. They seize upon every object within their reach, whatever it may be. Thus a single religious force may animate the most diverse things which, by that very fact, become closely connected and classified within a single group. We shall return again to this contagiousness, when we shall show that it comes from the social origins of the idea of sacredness (Bk. III, ch. i, in fine).
[736] Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit., pp. 77 ff.
[737] Ibid., p. 79.
[738] See above, p. 146.
[739] This is the case with the Gnanji; see Nor. Tr., pp. 170, 546; cf. a similar case in Brough Smyth, II, p. 269.
[740] Australian Aborigines, p. 51.
[741] There certainly was a time when the Gnanji women had souls, for a large number of women's souls still exist to-day. However, they never reincarnate themselves; since in this tribe the soul animating a new-born child is an old reincarnated soul, it follows from the fact that women's souls do not reincarnate themselves, that women cannot have a soul. Moreover, it is possible to explain whence this absence of reincarnation comes. Filiation among the Gnanji, after having been uterine, is now in the paternal line: a mother no longer transmits her totem to her child. So the woman no longer has any descendants to perpetuate her; she is the finis familiæ suæ. To explain this situation, there are only two possible hypotheses; either women have no souls, or else they are destroyed after death. The Gnanji have adopted the former of these two explanations; certain peoples of Queensland have preferred the latter (see Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, in N. Queensland Ethnog., No. 5, § 68).