The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1

by R. V. Russell

65. The common life of the clan.

The totem-clan held itself to partake of the life of its totem, and on the above hypothesis one common life would flow through all the animals and plants of the totem and all the members of the clan. An Australian calls his totem his Wingong (friend) or Tumang (flesh), and nowadays expresses his sorrow when he has to eat it.[148] If a man wishes to injure any man of a certain totem, he kills any animal of that man’s totem.[149] This clearly shows that one common life is held to bind together all the animals of the totem-species and all the members of the totem-clan, and the belief seems to be inexplicable on any other hypothesis. The same is the case with the sex-totems of the Kurnai tribe. In addition to the clan-totems all the boys have the Superb Warbler bird as a sex-totem, and call it their elder brother; and all the girls the Emu-wren, and call it their elder sister. If the boys wish to annoy the girls, or vice versa, each kills or injures the other’s totem-bird, and such an act is always followed by a free fight between the boys and girls.[150] Sex-totems are a peculiar development which need not be discussed here, but again it would appear that a common life runs through the birds of the totem and the members of the sex. Professor Robertson Smith describes the clan or kin as follows: “A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, one single animated mass of blood, flesh and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering. This point of view is expressed in the Semitic tongue in many familiar forms of speech. In case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, ‘The blood of M. or N. has been spilt’ (naming the man): they say, ‘Our blood has been spilt.’ In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is, ‘I am your bone and your flesh.’ Both in Hebrew and in Arabic flesh is synonymous with ‘clan’ or kindred group.”[151] The custom of the blood-feud appears to have arisen from the belief in a common life of the clan. “The blood-feud is an institution not peculiar to tribes reckoning descent through females; and it is still in force. By virtue of its requirements every member of a kin, one of whom had suffered at the hands of a member of another kin, was bound to avenge the wrong upon the latter kin. Such is the solidarity between members of a kin that vengeance might be taken upon any member of the offending kin, though he might be personally quite innocent. In the growth of civilisation vengeance has gradually come to be concentrated upon the offender only.”[152] Thus the blood-feud appears to have originated from the idea of primary retributive justice between clan and clan. When a member of a clan had been killed, one of the offending clan must be killed in return. Who he might be, and whether the original homicide was justifiable or not, were questions not regarded by primitive man; motives were abstract ideas with which he had no concern; he only knew that a piece of the common life had been lopped off, and the instinct of self-preservation of the clan demanded that a piece of the life of the offending clan should be cut off in return. And the tie which united the kin was eating and drinking together. “According to antique ideas those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation.”[153] This was the bond which first united the members of the totem-clan both among themselves and with their totem. And the relationship with the totem could only have arisen from the fact that they ate it. The belief in a common life could not possibly arise in the totem-clan towards any animal or plant which they did not eat or otherwise use. These they would simply disregard. Nor would savages, destitute at first of any moral ideas, and frequently on the brink of starvation, abstain from eating any edible animal from sentimental considerations; and, as already seen, the first totems were generally edible. They could not either have in the first place eaten the totem ceremonially, as there would be no reason for such a custom. But the ceremonial eating of the domestic animal, which was the tie subsequently uniting the members of the tribe,[154] cannot be satisfactorily explained except on the hypothesis that it was evolved from the customary eating of the totem-animal. Primitive savages would only feel affection towards the animals which they ate, just as the affection of animals is gained by feeding them. The objection might be made that savages could not feel affection and kinship for an animal which they killed and ate, but no doubt exists that they do.

“In British Columbia, when the fishing season commenced and the fish began coming up the rivers, the Indians used to meet them and speak to them. They paid court to them and would address them thus: ‘You fish, you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all chiefs.’ Among the Northas when a bear is killed, it is dressed in a bonnet, covered with fine down, and solemnly invited to the chiefs presence.”[155] And there are many other instances.[156] Savages had no clear realisation of death, and they did not think that the life of the animal was extinguished but that it passed to them with the flesh. Moreover they only ate part of the life. In many cases also the totem-animal only appeared at a certain season of the year, in consequence of the habit of hibernation or migration in search of food, while trees only bore fruit in their season. The savage, regarding all animals and plants as possessed of self-conscious life and volition, would think that they came of their own accord to give him subsistence or life. Afterwards, when they had obtained the idea of a soul or spirit, and of the survival of the soul after death, and when, on the introduction of personal names, the personality of individuals could be realised and remembered after death, they frequently thought that the spirits of ancestors went back to the totem-animal, whence they derived their life. The idea of descent from the totem would thus naturally arise. As the means of subsistence increased, and especially in those communities which had domesticated animals or cultivated plants, the conception of the totem as the chief source of life would gradually die away and be replaced by the belief in descent from it; and when they also thought that the spirits of ancestors were in the totem, they would naturally abstain from eating it. Perhaps also the Australians consider that the members of the totem-clan should abstain from eating the totem for fear of injuring the common life, as more advanced communities abstained from eating the flesh of domestic animals. This may be the ground for the rule that they should only eat sparingly of the totem. To the later period may be ascribed the adoption of carnivorous animals as totems; when these animals came to be feared and also venerated for their qualities of strength, ferocity and courage, warriors would naturally wish to claim kinship with and descent from them.

66. Living and eating together.

When the members of the totem-clan who lived together recognised that they owed something to each other, and that the gratification of the instincts and passions of the individual must to a certain degree be restrained if they endangered the lives and security of other members of the clan, they had taken the first step on the long path of moral and social progress. The tie by which they supposed themselves to be united was quite different from those which have constituted a bond of union between the communities who have subsequently lived together in the tribe, the city-state and the country. These have been a common religion, common language, race, or loyalty to a common sovereign; but the real bond has throughout been the common good or the public interest. And the desire for this end on the part of the majority of the members of the community, or the majority of those who were able to express their opinions, though its action was until recently not overt nor direct, and was not recognised, has led to the gradual evolution of the whole fabric of law and moral feeling, in order to govern and control the behaviour and conduct of the individual in his relations with his family, neighbours and fellow-citizens for the public advantage. The members of the totem-clan would have been quite unable to understand either the motives by which they were themselves actuated or the abstract ideas which have united more advanced communities; but they devised an even stronger bond than these, in supposing that they were parts or fractions of one common body or life. This was the more necessary as their natural impulses were uncontrolled by moral feeling. They conceived the bond of union in the concrete form of eating together. As language improved and passing events were recorded in speech and in the mind, the faculty of memory was perhaps concurrently developed. Then man began to realise the insecurity of his life, the dangers and misfortunes to which he was subject, the periodical failure or irregularity of the supply of food, and the imminent risks of death. Memory of the past made him apprehensive for the future, and holding that every event was the result of an act of volition, he began to assume an attitude either of veneration, gratitude, or fear towards the strongest of the beings by whom he thought his destinies were controlled—the sun, moon, sky, wind and rain, the ocean and great rivers, high mountains and trees, and the most important animals of his environment, whether they destroyed or assisted to preserve his life. The ideas of propitiation, atonement and purification were then imparted to the sacrifice, and it became an offering to a god.[157] But the primary idea of eating or drinking together as a bond of union was preserved, and can be recognised in religious and social custom to an advanced period of civilisation.

67. The origin of exogamy.

Again, Dr. Westermarck shows that the practice of exogamy or the avoidance of intermarriage did not at first arise between persons recognised as blood relations, but between those who lived together. “Facts show that the extent to which relatives are not allowed to intermarry is nearly connected with their close living together. Generally speaking the prohibited degrees are extended much further among savage and barbarous peoples than in civilised societies. As a rule the former, if they have not remained in the most primitive social condition of man, live not in separate families but in large households or communities, all the members of which dwell in very close contact with each other.”[158] And later, after adducing the evil results of self-fertilisation in plants and close interbreeding in animals, Dr. Westermarck continues: “Taking all these facts into consideration, I cannot but believe that consanguineous marriages, in some way or other, are more or less detrimental to the species. And here I think we may find a quite sufficient explanation of the horror of incest; not because man at an early stage recognised the injurious influence of close intermarriage, but because the law of natural selection must inevitably have operated. Among the ancestors of man, as among other animals, there was no doubt a time when blood relationship was no bar to sexual intercourse. But variations here, as elsewhere, would naturally present themselves; and those of our ancestors who avoided in-and-in breeding would survive, while the others would gradually decay and ultimately perish. Thus an instinct would be developed, which would be powerful enough as a rule to prevent injurious unions. Of course it would display itself simply as an aversion on the part of individuals to union with others with whom they lived; but these as a matter of fact would be blood relations, so that the result would be the survival of the fittest.”

68. Promiscuity and female descent.

The instinct of exogamy first developed in the totem-clan when it was migratory and lived by hunting, at least among the Australians and probably the American Indians.

The first condition of the clan was one of sexual promiscuity, and in Totemism and Exogamy Sir J.G. Frazer has adduced many instances of periodical promiscuous debauchery which probably recall this state of things.[159] The evil results which would accrue from in-breeding in the condition of promiscuity may have been modified by such incidents as the expulsion of the young males through the spasmodic jealousy of the older ones, the voluntary segregation of the old males, fights and quarrels leading to the rearrangement of groups, and the frequent partial destruction of a group, when the survivors might attach themselves to a new group. Primitive peoples attached the utmost importance to the rule of exogamy, and the punishments for the breach of it were generally more severe than those for the violation of the laws of affinity in civilised countries. The Australians say that the good spirit or the wise men prescribed to them the rule that the members of each totem-clan should not marry with each other.[160] Similarly the Gonds say that their divine hero, Lingo, introduced the rule of exogamy and the division into clans before he went to the gods.