THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM
The reader need not fear that psychoanalysis, which first revealed the
regular over-determination of psychic acts and formations, will be
tempted to derive anything so complicated as religion from a single
source. If it necessarily seeks, as in duty bound, to gain recognition
for one of the sources of this institution, it by no means claims
exclusiveness for this source or even first rank among the concurring
factors. Only a synthesis from various fields of research can decide
what relative importance in the genesis of religion is to be assigned to
the mechanism which we are to discuss; but such a task exceeds the means
as well as the intentions of the psychoanalyst.
1
The first chapter of this book made us acquainted with the conception of
totemism. We heard that totemism is a system which takes the place of
religion among certain primitive races in Australia, America, and
Africa, and furnishes the basis of social organization. We know that in
1869 the Scotchman MacLennan attracted general interest to the phenomena
of totemism, which until then had been considered merely as curiosities,
by his conjecture that a large number of customs and usages in various
old as well as modern societies were to be taken as remnants of a
totemic epoch. Science has since then fully recognized this significance
of totemism. I quote a passage from the _Elements of the Psychology of
Races_ by W. Wundt (1912), as the latest utterance on this
question[133]: ‘Taking all this together it becomes highly probable that
a totemic culture was at one time the preliminary stage of every later
evolution as well as a transition stage between the state of primitive
man and the age of gods and heroes.’
It is necessary for the purposes of this chapter to go more deeply into
the nature of totemism. For reasons that will be evident later I here
give preference to an outline by S. Reinach, who in the year 1900
sketched the following _Code du Totémisme_ in twelve articles, like a
catechism of the totemic religion[134]:
1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up
individual animals of these species and take care of them.
2. An animal that dies accidentally is mourned and buried with the same
honours as a member of the tribe.
3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes refers only to a certain part
of the animal.
4. If pressure of necessity compels the killing of an animal usually
spared, it is done with excuses to the animal and the attempt is made to
mitigate the violation of the taboo, namely the killing, through various
tricks and evasions.
5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual, it is solemnly mourned.
6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious ceremonies, the skins
of certain animals are donned. Where totemism still exists, these are
totem animals.
7. Tribes and individuals assume the names of totem animals.
8. Many tribes use pictures of animals as coats of arms and decorate
their weapons with them; the men paint animal pictures on their bodies
or have them tattooed.
9. If the totem is one of the feared and dangerous animals it is assumed
that the animal will spare the members of the tribe named after it.
10. The totem animal protects and warns the members of the tribe.
11. The totem animal foretells the future to those faithful to it and
serves as their leader.
12. The members of a totem tribe often believe that they are connected
with the totem animal by the bond of common origin.
The value of this catechism of the totem religion can be more
appreciated if one bears in mind that Reinach has here also incorporated
all the signs and clews which lead to the conclusion that the totemic
system had once existed. The peculiar attitude of this author to the
problem is shown by the fact that to some extent he neglects the
essential traits of totemism, and we shall see that of the two main
tenets of the totemistic catechism he has forced one into the background
and completely lost sight of the other.
In order to get a more correct picture of the characteristics of
totemism we turn to an author who has devoted four volumes to the theme,
combining the most complete collection of the observations in question
with the most thorough discussion of the problems they raise. We shall
remain indebted to J. G. Frazer, the author of _Totemism and
Exogamy_[135], for the pleasure and information he affords, even though
psychoanalytic investigation may lead us to results which differ widely
from his[136].
“A totem,” wrote Frazer in his first essay[137], “is a class of material
objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing
that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate
and altogether special relation. The connexion between a person and his
totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man and the man
shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it
be an animal, and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As
distinguished from a fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual but
always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants,
more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of
artificial objects.”
At least three kinds of totem can be distinguished:
1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe shares and which is hereditary
from generation to generation,
2. The sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine members
of a tribe to the exclusion of the opposite sex, and
3. The individual totem which belongs to the individual and does not
descend to his successors.
The last two kinds of totem are comparatively of little importance
compared to the tribal totem. Unless we are mistaken they are recent
formations and of little importance as far as the nature of the taboo is
concerned.
The tribal totem (clan totem) is the object of veneration of a group of
men and women who take their name from the totem and consider themselves
consanguineous offspring of a common ancestor, and who are firmly
associated with each other through common obligations towards each other
as well as by the belief in their totem.
Totemism is a religious as well as a social system. On its religious
side it consists of the relations of mutual respect and consideration
between a person and his totem, and on its social side it is composed of
obligations of the members of the clan towards each other and towards
other tribes. In the later history of totemism these two sides show a
tendency to part company; the social system often survives the religious
and conversely remnants of totemism remain in the religion of countries
in which the social system based upon totemism had disappeared. In the
present state of our ignorance about the origin of totemism we cannot
say with certainty how these two sides were originally combined. But
there is on the whole a strong probability that in the beginning the two
sides of totemism were indistinguishable from each other. In other
words, the further we go back the clearer it becomes that a member of a
tribe looks upon himself as being of the same genus as his totem and
makes no distinction between his attitude towards the totem and his
attitude towards his tribal companions.
In the special description of totemism as a religious system, Frazer
lays stress on the fact that the members of a tribe assume the name of
their totem and also as a _rule believe that they are descended from
it._ It is due to this belief that they do not hunt the totem animal or
kill or eat it, and that they deny themselves every other use of the
totem if it is not an animal. The prohibitions against killing or eating
the totem are not the only taboos affecting it; sometimes it is also
forbidden to touch it and even to look at it; in a number of cases the
totem must not be called by its right name. Violation of the taboo
prohibitions which protect the totem is punished automatically by
serious disease or death[138].
Specimens of the totem animals are sometimes raised by the clan and
taken care of in captivity[139]. A totem animal found dead is mourned
and buried like a member of the clan. If a totem animal had to be killed
it was done with a prescribed ritual of excuses and ceremonies of
expiation.
The tribe expected protection and forbearance from its totem. If it was
a dangerous animal (a beast of prey or a poisonous snake), it was
assumed that it would not harm, and where this assumption did not come
true the person attacked was expelled from the tribe. Frazer thinks that
oaths were originally ordeals, many tests as to descent and genuineness
being in this way left to the decision of the totem. The totem helps in
case of illness and gives the tribe premonitions and warnings. The
appearance of the totem animal near a house was often looked upon as an
announcement of death. The totem had come to get its relative[140].
A member of a clan seeks to emphasize his relationship to the totem in
various significant ways; he imitates an exterior similarity by dressing
himself in the skin of the totem animal, by having the picture of it
tattooed upon himself, and in other ways. On the solemn occasions of
birth, initiation into manhood or funeral obsequies this identification
with the totem is carried out in deeds and words. Dances in which all
the members of the tribe disguise themselves as their totem and act like
it, serve various magic and religious purposes. Finally there are the
ceremonies at which the totem animal is killed in a solemn manner[141].
The social side of totemism is primarily expressed in a sternly
observed commandment and in a tremendous restriction. The members of a
totem clan are brothers and sisters, pledged to help and protect each
other; if a member of the clan is slain by a stranger the whole tribe of
the slayer must answer for the murder and the clan of the slain man
shows its solidarity in the demand for expiation for the blood that has
been shed. The ties of the totem are stronger than our ideas of family
ties, with which they do not altogether coincide, since the transfer of
the totem takes place as a rule through maternal inheritance, paternal
inheritance possibly not counting at all in the beginning.
But the corresponding taboo restriction consists in the prohibition
against members of the same clan marrying each other or having any kind
of sexual intercourse whatsoever with each other. This is the famous and
enigmatic _exogamy_ connexion with totemism. We have devoted the whole
first chapter of this book to it, and therefore need only mention here
that this exogamy springs from the intensified incest dread of primitive
races, that it becomes entirely comprehensible as a security against
incest in group marriages, and that at first it accomplishes the
avoidance of incest for the younger generation and only in the course
of further development becomes a hindrance to the older generation as
well[142].
To this presentation of totemism by Frazer, one of the earliest in the
literature on the subject, I will now add a few excerpts from one of the
latest summaries. In the _Elements of the Psychology of Races_, which
appeared in 1912, W. Wundt says[143]: “The totem animal is considered
the ancestral animal. ‘Totem’ is therefore both a group name and a birth
name and in the latter aspect this name has at the same time a
mythological meaning. But all these uses of the conception play into
each other and the particular meanings may recede so that in some cases
the totems have become almost a mere nomenclature of the tribal
divisions, while in others the idea of the descent or else the cultic
meaning of the totem remains in the foreground.... The conception of the
totem determines the _tribal_ arrangement and the _tribal organization_.
These norms and their establishment in the belief and feelings of the
members of the tribe account for the fact that originally the totem
animal was certainly not considered merely a name for a group division
but that it usually was considered the progenitor of the corresponding
division.... This accounted for the fact that these animal ancestors
enjoyed a cult.... This animal cult expresses itself primarily in the
attitude towards the totem animal, quite aside from special ceremonies
and ceremonial festivities: not only each individual animal but every
representative of the same species was to a certain degree a sanctified
animal; the member of the totem was forbidden to eat the flesh of the
totem animal or he was allowed to eat it only under special
circumstances. This is in accord with the significant contradictory
phenomenon found in this connexion, namely, that under certain
conditions there was a kind of ceremonial consumption of the totem
flesh....”
“ ...But the most important social side of this totemic tribal
arrangement consists in the fact that it was connected with certain
rules of conduct for the relations of the groups with each other. The
most important of these were the rules of conjugal relations. This
tribal division is thus connected with an important phenomenon which
first made its appearance in the totemic age, namely with exogamy.”
If we wish to arrive at the characteristics of the original totemism by
sifting through everything that may correspond to later development or
decline, we find the following essential facts: _The totems were
originally only animals and were considered the ancestors of single
tribes. The totem was hereditary only through the female line; it was
forbidden to kill the totem_ (or to eat it, which under primitive
conditions amounts to the same thing); _members of a totem were
forbidden to have sexual intercourse with each other_[144].
It may now seem strange to us that in the _Code du totémisme_ which
Reinach has drawn up the one principal taboo, namely exogamy, does not
appear at all while the assumption of the second taboo, namely the
descent from the totem animal, is only casually mentioned. Yet Reinach
is an author to whose work in this field we owe much and I have chosen
his presentation in order to prepare us for the differences of opinion
among the authors, which will now occupy our attention.
2
The more convinced we became that totemism had regularly formed a phase
of every culture, the more urgent became the necessity of arriving at an
understanding of it and of casting light upon the riddle of its nature.
To be sure, everything about totemism is in the nature of a riddle; the
decisive questions are the origin of the totem, the motivation of
exogamy (or rather of the incest taboo which it represents) and the
relation between the two, the totem organization and the incest
prohibition. The understanding should be at once historical and
psychological; it should inform us under what conditions this peculiar
institution developed and to what psychic needs of man it has given
expression.
The reader will certainly be astonished to hear from how many different
points of view the answer to these questions has been attempted and how
far the opinions of expert investigators vary. Almost everything that
might be asserted in general about totemism is doubtful; even the above
statement of it, taken from an article by Frazer in 1887, cannot escape
the criticism that it expresses an arbitrary preference of the author
and would be challenged to-day by Frazer himself, who has repeatedly
changed his view on the subject[145].
It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism and exogamy could be
most readily grasped if we could get into closer touch with the origin
of both institutions. But in judging the state of affairs we must not
forget the remark of Andrew Lang, that even primitive races have not
preserved these original forms and the conditions of their origin, so
that we are altogether dependent upon hypotheses to take the place of
the observation we lack[146]. Among the attempted explanations some seem
inadequate from the very beginning in the judgment of the psychologist.
They are altogether too rational and do not take into consideration the
effective character of what they are to explain. Others rest on
assumptions which observation fails to verify; while still others appeal
to facts which could better be subjected to another interpretation. The
refutation of these various opinions as a rule hardly presents any
difficulties; the authors are, as usual, stronger in the criticism which
they practice on each other than in their own work. The final result as
regards most of the points treated is a _non liquet_. It is therefore
not surprising that most of the new literature on the subject, which we
have largely omitted here, shows the unmistakable effort to reject a
general solution of totemic problems as unfeasible. (See, for instance,
B. Goldenweiser in the _Journal of American Folklore_ <small>XXIII</small>, 1910.
Reviewed in the _Brittanica Year Book_, 1913.) I have taken the liberty
of disregarding the chronological order in stating these contradictory
hypotheses.
(_a_) THE ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM
The question of the origin of totemism can also be formulated as
follows: How did primitive people come to select the names of animals,
plants and inanimate objects for themselves and their tribes?[147]
The Scotchman, MacLennan, who discovered totemism and exogamy for
science[148], refrained from publishing his views of the origin of
totemism. According to a communication of Andrew Lang[149] he was for a
time inclined to trace totemism back to the custom of tattooing. I shall
divide the accepted theories of the derivation of totemism into three
groups, ([Greek: α a]) nominalistic, ([Greek: β b]) sociological, ([Greek:
γ g]) psychological.
([Greek: α a]) _The Nominalistic Theories_
The information about these theories will justify their summation under
the headings I have used.
Garcilaso de La Vega, a descendant of the Peruvian Inkas, who wrote the
history of his race in the seventeenth century, is already said to have
traced back what was known to him about totemic phenomena to the need of
the tribes to differentiate themselves from each other by means of
names[150]. The same idea appears centuries later in the _Ethnology_ of
A. K. Keane where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges
through which individuals, families and tribes wanted to differentiate
themselves[151].
Max Müller expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem in
his _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_[152]. A totem is said to
be, 1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name, 3. the name of the ancestor
of the clan, 4. the name of the object which the clan reveres. J. Pikler
wrote later, in 1899, that men needed a permanent name for communities
and individuals that could be preserved in writing.... Thus totemism
arises, not from a religious, but from a prosaic everyday need of
mankind. The giving of names, which is the essence of totemism, is a
result of the technique of primitive writing. The totem is of the nature
of an easily represented writing symbol. But if savages first bore the
name of an animal they deduced the idea of relationship from this
animal[153].
Herbert Spencer[154], also, thought that the origin of totemism was to
be found in the giving of names. The attributes of certain individuals,
he showed, had brought about their being named after animals so that
they had come to have names of honour or nicknames which continued in
their descendants. As a result of the indefiniteness and
incomprehensibility of primitive languages, these names are said to have
been taken by later generations as proof of their descent from the
animals themselves. Totemism would thus be the result of a mistaken
reverence for ancestors.
Lord Avebury (better known under his former name, Sir John Lubbock) has
expressed himself quite similarly about the origin of totemism, though
without emphasizing the misunderstanding. If we want to explain the
veneration of animals we must not forget how often human names are
borrowed from animals. The children and followers of a man who was
called bear or lion naturally made this their ancestral name. In this
way it came about that the animal itself came to be respected and
finally venerated.
Fison has advanced what seems an irrefutable objection to such a
derivation of the totem name from the names of individuals[155]. He
shows from conditions in Australia that the totem is always the mark of
a group of people and never of an individual. But if it were otherwise,
if the totem was originally the name of a single individual, it could
never, with the system of maternal inheritance, descend to his children.
The theories thus far stated are evidently inadequate. They may explain
how animal names came to be applied to primitive tribes but they can
never explain the importance attached to the giving of names which
constitutes the totemic system. The most noteworthy theory of this
group has been developed by Andrew Lang in his books, _Social Origins_,
1903, and _The Secret of the Totem_, 1905. This theory still makes
naming the centre of the problem, but it uses two interesting
psychological factors and thus may claim to have contributed to the
final solution of the riddle of totemism.
Andrew Lang holds that it does not make any difference how clans
acquired their animal names. It might be assumed that one day they awoke
to the consciousness that they had them without being able to account
from where they came. _The origin of these names had been forgotten._ In
that case they would seek to acquire more information by pondering over
their names, and with their conviction of the importance of names they
necessarily came to all the ideas that are contained in the totemic
system. For primitive men, as for savages of to-day and even for our
children[156], a name is not indifferent and conventional as it seems to
us, but is something important and essential. A man’s name is one of the
main constituents of his person and perhaps a part of his psyche. The
fact that they had the same names as animals must have led primitive men
to assume a secret and important bond between their persons and the
particular animal species. What other bond than consanguinity could it
be? But if the similarity of names once led to this assumption it could
also account directly for all the totemic prohibitions of the blood
taboo, including exogamy.
“No more than these three things--a group animal name of unknown origin;
belief in a transcendental connexion between all bearers, human and
bestial, of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions--were
needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, including
exogamy” (_Secret of the Totem_, p. 126).
Lang’s explanation extends over two periods. It derives the totemic
system of psychological necessity from the totem names, on the
assumption that the origin of the naming has been forgotten. The other
part of the theory now seeks to clear up the origin of these names. We
shall see that it bears an entirely different stamp.
This other part of the Lang theory is not markedly different from those
which I have called ‘nominalistic’. The practical need of
differentiation compelled the individual tribes to assume names and
therefore they tolerated the names which every tribe ascribed to the
other. This ‘naming from without’ is the peculiarity of Lang’s
construction. The fact that the names which thus originated were
borrowed from animals is not further remarkable and need not have been
felt by primitive men as abuse or derision. Besides, Lang has cited
numerous cases from later epochs of history in which names given from
without that were first meant to be derisive were accepted by those
nicknamed and voluntarily borne (The Guises, Whigs and Tories). The
assumption that the origin of these names was forgotten in the course of
time connects this second part of the Lang theory with the first one
just mentioned.
([Greek: β b]) _The Sociological Theories_
S. Reinach, who successfully traced the relics of the totemic system in
the cult and customs of later periods, though attaching from the very
beginning only slight value to the factor of descent from the totem
animal, once made the casual remark that totemism seemed to him to be
nothing but “_une hypertrophie de l’instinct social_.”[157]
The same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of E. Durkheim,
_Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse; Le Systême Totémique en
Australie_, 1912. The totem is the visible representative of the social
religion of these races. It embodies the community, which is the real
object of veneration.
Other authors have sought a more intimate reason for the share which
social impulses have played in the formation of totemic institutions.
Thus A. C. Haddon has assumed that every primitive tribe originally
lived on a particular plant or animal species and perhaps also traded
with this food and exchanged it with other tribes. It then was
inevitable that a tribe should become known to other tribes by the name
of the animal which played such weighty rôle with it. At the same time
this tribe would develop a special familiarity with this animal, and a
kind of interest for it which, however, was based upon the psychic
motive of man’s most elementary and pressing need, namely, hunger[158].
The objections against this most rational of all the totem theories are
that such a state of the food supply is never found among primitive men
and probably never existed. Savages are the more omnivorous the lower
they stand in the social scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how such
an exclusive diet could have developed an almost religious relation to
the totem, culminating in an absolute abstention from the referred food.
The first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which
Frazer stated was a psychological one. We shall report it elsewhere.
Frazer’s second theory, which we will discuss here, originated under the
influence of an important publication by two investigators of the
inhabitants of Central Australia[159].
Spencer and Gillen describe a series of peculiar institutions, customs,
and opinions of a group of tribes, the so-called Arunta nation, and
Frazer subscribes to their opinion that these peculiarities are to be
looked upon as characteristics of a primary state and that they can
explain the first and real meaning of totemism.
In the Arunta tribe itself (a part of the Arunta nation) these
peculiarities are as follows:
1. They have the division into totem clans but the totem is not
hereditary but is individually determined (as will be shown later).
2. The totem clans are not exogamous, and the marriage restrictions are
brought about by a highly developed division into marriage classes which
have nothing to do with the totems.
3. The function of the totem clan consists of carrying out a ceremony
which in a subtle magic manner brings about an increase of the edible
totem. (This ceremony is called _Intichiuma_.)
4. The Aruntas have a peculiar theory about conception and re-birth.
They assume that the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem
wait for their re-birth in definite localities and penetrate into the
bodies of the women who pass such a spot. When a child is born the
mother states at which spirit abode she thinks she conceived her child.
This determines the totem of the child. It is further assumed that the
spirits (of the dead as well as of the re-born) are bound to peculiar
stone amulets, called _Churinga_, which are found in these places.
Two factors seem to have induced Frazer to believe that the oldest form
of totemism had been found in the institution of the Aruntas. In the
first place the existence of certain myths which assert that the
ancestors of the Aruntas always lived on their totem animal, and that
they married no other women except those of their own totem. Secondly,
the apparent disregard of the sexual act in their theory of conception.
People who have not yet realized that conception was the result of the
sexual act might well be considered the most backward and primitive
people living to-day.
Frazer, in having recourse to the _Intichiuma_ ceremony to explain
totemism, suddenly saw the totemic system in a totally different light
as a thoroughly practical organization for accomplishing the most
natural needs of man. (Compare Haddon above[160].) The system was simply
an extraordinary piece of ‘co-operative magic’. Primitive men formed
what might be called a magic production and consumption club. Each totem
clan undertook to see to the cleanliness of a certain article of food.
If it were a question of inedible totems like harmful animals, rain,
wind, or similar objects, it was the duty of the totem clan to dominate
this part of nature and to ward off its injuriousness. The efforts of
each clan were for the good of all the others. As the clan could not eat
its totem or could eat only a very little of it, it furnished this
valuable product for the rest and was in turn furnished with what these
had to take care of as their social totem duty. In the light of this
interpretation furnished by the _Intichiuma_ ceremony, it appeared to
Frazer as if the prohibition against eating the totem had misled
observers to neglect the more important side of the relation, namely the
commandment to supply as much as possible of the edible totem for the
needs of others.
Frazer accepted the tradition of the Aruntas that each totem clan had
originally lived on its totem without any restriction. It then became
difficult to understand the evolution that followed through which
savages were satisfied to ensure the totem for others while they
themselves abstained from eating it. He then assumed that this
restriction was by no means the result of a kind of religious respect,
but came about through the observation that no animal devoured its own
kind, so that this break in the identification with the totem was
injurious to the power which savages sought to acquire over the totem.
Or else it resulted from the endeavour to make the being favourably
disposed by sparing it. Frazer did not conceal the difficulties of this
explanation from himself[161], nor did he dare to indicate in what way
the habit of marrying within the totem, which the myths of the Aruntas
proclaimed, was converted into exogamy.
Frazer’s theory based on the _Intichiuma_, stands or falls with the
recognition of the primitive nature of the Arunta institutions. But it
seems impossible to hold to this in the fact of the objections advanced
by Durkheim[162] and Lang[163]. The Aruntas seem on the contrary to be
the most developed of the Australian tribes and to represent rather a
dissolution stage of totemism than its beginning. The myths that made
such an impression on Frazer because they emphasize, in contrast to
prevailing institutions of to-day, that the Aruntas are free to eat the
totem and to marry within it, easily explain themselves to us as wish
phantasies, which are projected into the past, like the myths of the
Golden Age.
([Greek: γ g]) _The Psychological Theories_
Frazer’s first psychological theories, formed before his acquaintance
with the observations of Spencer and Gillen, were based upon the belief
in an ‘outward soul’[164]. The totem was meant to represent a safe place
of refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers
which threaten it. After primitive man had housed his soul in his totem
he himself became invulnerable and he naturally took care himself not to
harm the bearer of his soul. But as he did not know which individual of
the species in question was the bearer of his soul he was concerned in
sparing the whole species. Frazer himself later gave up this derivation
of totemism from the belief in souls.
When he became acquainted with the observations of Spencer and Gillen
he set up the other social theory which has just been stated, but he
himself then saw that the motive from which he had derived totemism was
altogether too ‘rational’ and that he had assumed a social organization
for it which was altogether too complicated to be called primitive[165].
The magic co-operative companies now appeared to him rather as the fruit
than as the germ of totemism. He sought a simpler factor for the
derivation of totemism in the shape of a primitive superstition behind
these forms. He then found this original factor in the remarkable
conception theory of the Aruntas.
As already stated, the Aruntas establish no connexion between conception
and the sexual act. If a woman feels herself to be a mother it means
that at that moment one of the spirits from the nearest spirit abode who
has been watching for a re-birth, has penetrated into her body and is
born as her child. This child has the same totem as all the spirits that
lurk in that particular locality. But if we are willing to go back a
step further and assume that the woman originally believed that the
animal, plant, stone, or other object which occupied her fancy at the
moment when she first felt herself pregnant had really penetrated into
her and was being born through her in human form, then the identity of a
human being with his totem would really be founded on the belief of the
mother, and all the other totem commandments (with the exception of
exogamy) could easily be derived from this belief. Men would refuse to
eat the particular animal or plant because it would be just like eating
themselves. But occasionally they would be impelled to eat some of their
totem in a ceremonial manner because they could thus strengthen their
identification with the totem, which is the essential part of totemism.
W. H. R. Rivers’ observations among the inhabitants of the Bank Islands
seemed to prove men’s direct identification with their totems on the
basis of such a conception theory[166].
The ultimate sources of totemism would then be the ignorance of savages
as to the process of procreation among human beings and animals;
especially their ignorance as to the rôle which the male plays in
fertilization. This ignorance must be facilitated by the long interval
which is interposed between the fertilizing act and the birth of the
child or the sensation of the child’s first movements. Totemism is
therefore a creation of the feminine mind and not of the masculine. The
sick fancies of the pregnant woman are the roots of it. Anything indeed
that struck a woman at that mysterious moment of her life when she first
knows herself to be a mother might easily be identified by her with the
child in her womb. Such maternal fancies, so natural and seemingly so
universal, appear to be the root of totemism[167].
The main objection to this third theory of Frazer’s is the same which
has already been advanced against his second, sociological theory. The
Aruntas seem to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism. Their
denial of fatherhood does not apparently rest upon primitive ignorance;
in many cases they even have paternal inheritance. They seem to have
sacrificed fatherhood to a kind of a speculation which strives to honour
the ancestral spirits[168]. Though they raise the myth of immaculate
conception through a spirit to a general theory of conception, we cannot
for that reason credit them with ignorance as to the conditions of
procreation any more than we could the old races who lived during the
rise of the Christian myths.
Another psychological theory of the origin of totemism has been
formulated by the Dutch writer, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a
connexion between totemism and the migration of souls. “The animal into
which, according to general belief, the souls of the dead passed, became
a blood relative, an ancestor, and was revered as such.” But the belief
in the soul’s migration to animals is more readily derived from totemism
than inversely[169].
Still another theory of totemism is advanced by the excellent American
ethnologists, Franz Boas, Hill-Tout, and others. It is based on
observations of totemic Indian tribes and asserts that the totem is
originally the guardian spirit of an ancestor who has acquired it
through a dream and handed it on to his descendants. We have already
heard the difficulties which the derivation of totemism through
inheritance from a single individual offers; besides, the Australian
observations seem by no means to support the tracing back of the totem
to the guardian spirit[170].
Two facts have become decisive for the last of the psychological
theories as stated by Wundt; in the first place, that the original and
most widely known totem object was an animal, and secondly, that the
earliest totem animals corresponded to animals which had a soul[171].
Such animals as birds, snakes, lizards, mice are fitted by their extreme
mobility, their flight through the air, and by other characteristics
which arouse surprise and fear, to become the bearers of souls which
leave their bodies. The totem animal is a descendant of the animal
transformations of the spirit-soul. Thus with Wundt totemism is directly
connected with the belief in souls or with animism.
(b) and (c) THE ORIGIN OF EXOGAMY AND ITS RELATION TO TOTEMISM
I have put forth the theories of totemism with considerable detail and
yet I am afraid that I have not made them clear enough on account of the
condensation that was constantly necessary. In the interest of the
reader I am taking the liberty of further condensing the other questions
that arise. The discussions about the exogamy of totem races become
especially complicated and untractable, one might even say confused, on
account of the nature of the material used. Fortunately the object of
this treatise permits me to limit myself to pointing out several
guide-posts and referring to the frequently quoted writings of experts
in the field for a more thorough pursuit of the subject.
The attitude of an author to the problems of exogamy is of course not
independent of the stand he has taken toward one or the other of the
totem theories. Some of these explanations of totemism lack all
connexion with exogamy so that the two institutions are entirely
separated. Thus we find here two opposing views, one of which clings to
the original likelihood that exogamy is an essential part of the totemic
system while the other disputes such a connection and believes in an
accidental combination of these two traits of the most ancient cultures.
In his later works Frazer has emphatically stood for this latter point
of view.
“I must request the reader to bear constantly in mind that the two
institutions of totemism and exogamy are fundamentally distinct in
origin and nature though they have accidentally crossed and blended in
many tribes.” (_Totemism and Exogamy_ I, Preface XII.)
He warns directly against the opposite view as being a source of endless
difficulties and misunderstandings. In contrast to this, many authors
have found a way of conceiving exogamy as a necessary consequence of the
basic views on totemism. Durkheim[172] has shown in his writings how
the taboo, which is attached to the totem, must have entailed the
prohibition against putting a woman of the same totem to sexual uses.
The totem is of the same blood as the human being and for this reason
the blood bann (in reference to defloration and menstruation) forbids
sexual intercourse with a woman of the same totem[173]. Andrew Lang, who
here agrees with Durkheim, goes so far as to believe that the blood
taboo was not necessary to bring about the prohibition in regard to the
women of the same tribe[174]. The general totem taboo which, for
instance, forbids any one to sit in the shadow of the totem tree, would
have sufficed. Andrew Lang also contends for another derivation of
exogamy (see below) and leaves it in doubt how these two explanations
are related to each other.
As regards the temporal relations, the majority of authors subscribe to
the opinion that totemism is the older institution and that exogamy came
later[175].
Among the theories which seek to explain exogamy independently of
totemism only a few need be mentioned in so far as they illustrate
different attitudes of the authors towards the problem of incest.
MacLennan[176] had ingeniously guessed that exogamy resulted from the
remnants of customs pointing to earlier forms of female rape. He assumed
that it was the general custom in ancient times to procure women from
strange tribes so that marriage with a woman from the same tribe
gradually became “improper because it was unusual”. He sought the motive
for the exogamous habit in the scarcity of women among these tribes,
which had resulted from the custom of killing most female children at
birth. We are not concerned here with investigation whether actual
conditions corroborate MacLennan’s assumptions. We are more interested
in the argument that these premises still leave it unexplained why the
male members of the tribe should have made these few women of their
blood inaccessible to themselves, as well as in the manner in which the
incest problem is here entirely neglected[177].
Other writers have on the contrary assumed, and evidently with more
right, that exogamy is to be interpreted as an institution for the
prevention of incest[178].
If we survey the gradually increasing complication of Australian
marriage restrictions we can hardly help agreeing with the opinion of
Morgan Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer[179], that these institutions
bear the stamp of ‘deliberate design’, as Frazer puts it, and that they
were meant to do what they have actually accomplished. “In no other way
does it seem possible to explain in all its details a system at once so
complex and so regular”[180].
It is of interest to point out that the first restrictions which the
introduction of marriage classes brought about affected the sexual
freedom of the younger generation, in other words, incest between
brothers and sisters and between sons and mothers, while incest between
father and daughter was only abrogated by more sweeping measures.
However, to trace back exogamous sexual restrictions to legal intentions
does not add anything to the understanding of the motive which created
these institutions. From what source, in the final analysis, springs the
dread of incest which must be recognized as the root of exogamy? It
evidently does not suffice to appeal to an instinctive aversion against
sexual intercourse with blood relatives, that is to say, to the fact of
incest dread, in order to explain the dread of incest, if social
experience shows that, in spite of this instinct, incest is not a rare
occurrence even in our society, and if the experience of history can
acquaint us with cases in which incestuous marriage of privileged
persons was made the rule.
Westermarck[181] advanced the following to explain the dread of incest:
“that an innate aversion against sexual intercourse exists between
persons who live together from childhood and that this feeling, since
such persons are as a rule consanguineous, finds a natural expression in
custom and law through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between
those closely related.” Though Havelock Ellis disputed the instinctive
character of this aversion in the _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, he
otherwise supported the same explanation in its essentials by declaring:
“The normal absence of the manifestation of the pairing instinct where
brothers and sisters or boys and girls living together from childhood
are concerned, is a purely negative phenomenon due to the fact that
under these circumstances the antecedent conditions for arousing the
mating instinct must be entirely lacking.... For persons who have grown
up together from childhood habit has dulled the sensual attraction of
seeing, hearing and touching and has led it into a channel of quiet
attachment, robbing it of its power to call forth the necessary
erethistic excitement required to produce sexual tumescence.”
It seems to me very remarkable that Westermarck looks upon this innate
aversion to sexual intercourse with persons with whom we have shared
childhood as being at the same time a psychic representative of the
biological fact that inbreeding means injury to the species. Such a
biological instinct would hardly go so far astray in its psychological
manifestation as to affect the companions of home and hearth which in
this respect are quite harmless, instead of the blood relatives which
alone are injurious to procreation. And I cannot resist citing the
excellent criticism which Frazer opposes to Westermarck’s assertion.
Frazer finds it incomprehensible that sexual sensibility to-day is not
at all opposed to sexual intercourse with companions of the hearth and
home while the dread of incest, which is said to be nothing but an
offshoot of this reluctance, has nowadays grown to be so overpowering.
But other remarks of Frazer’s go deeper and I set them down here in
unabbreviated form because they are in essential agreement with the
arguments developed in my chapter on taboo.
“It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need
reinforcement through law. There is no law commanding men to eat and
drink, or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and
drink and keep their hands out of the fire instinctively, for fear of
natural, not legal penalties, which would be entailed by violence done
to these instincts. The law only forbids men to do what their instincts
incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes it would
be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may
always safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes which many
men have a natural propensity to commit. If there were no such
propensity there would be no such crimes, and if no such crimes were
committed, what need to forbid them? Instead of assuming therefore, from
the legal prohibition of incest, that there is a natural aversion to
incest we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in
favour of it, and that if the law represses it, it does so because
civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of these
natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of
society”[182].
To this valuable argument of Frazer’s I can add that the experiences of
psychoanalysis make the assumption of such an innate aversion to
incestuous relations altogether impossible. They have taught, on the
contrary, that the first sexual impulses of the young are regularly of
an incestuous nature and that such repressed impulses play a rôle which
can hardly be overestimated as the motive power of later neuroses.
The interpretation of incest dread as an innate instinct must therefore
be abandoned. The same holds true of another derivation of the incest
prohibition which counts many supporters, namely the assumption that
primitive races very soon observed the dangers with which inbreeding
threatened their race and that they therefore had decreed the incest
prohibition with a conscious purpose. The objections to this attempted
explanation crowd upon each other[183]. Not only must the prohibition of
incest be older than all breeding of domestic animals from which men
could derive experience of the effect of inbreeding upon the
characteristics of the breed, but the harmful consequences of inbreeding
are not established beyond all doubt even to-day and in man they can be
shown only with difficulty. Besides, everything that we know about
contemporaneous savages makes it very improbable that the thoughts of
their far-removed ancestors should already have been occupied with
preventing injury to their later descendants. It sounds almost
ridiculous to attribute hygienic and eugenic motives such as have hardly
yet found consideration in our culture, to these children of the race
who lived without thought of the morrow[184].
And finally it must be pointed out that a prohibition against inbreeding
as an element weakening to the race, which is imposed from practical
hygienic motives, seems quite inadequate to explain the deep abhorrence
which our society feels against incest. This dread of incest, as I have
shown elsewhere[185], seems to be even more active and stronger among
primitive races living to-day than among the civilized.
In inquiring into the origin of incest dread it could be expected that
here also there is the choice between possible explanations of a
sociological, biological, and psychological nature in which the
psychological motives might have to be considered as representative of
biological forces. Still, in the end, one is compelled to subscribe to
Frazer’s resigned statement, namely, that we do not know the origin of
incest dread and do not even know how to guess at it. None of the
solutions of the riddle thus far advanced seems satisfactory to us[186].
I must mention another attempt to explain the origin of incest dread
which is of an entirely different nature from those considered up to
now. It might be called an historic explanation.
This attempt is associated with a hypothesis of Charles Darwin about the
primal social state of man. From the habits of the higher apes Darwin
concluded that man, too, lived originally in small hordes in which the
jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
“We may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male
quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for
battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of
nature is extremely improbable.... If we therefore look back far enough
into the stream of time and judging from the social habits of man as he
now exists, the most probable view is that he originally lived in small
communities, each with a single wife, or if powerful with several, whom
he jealously defended against all other men. Or he may not have been a
social animal and yet have lived with several wives, like the gorilla;
for all the natives agree that only the adult male is seen in a band;
when the young male grows up a contest takes place for mastery, and the
strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as
the head of the community (Dr Savage in the Boston _Journal of Natural
History_, Vol. V, 1845-7). The younger males being thus driven out and
wandering about would also, when at last successful in finding a
partner, prevent too close breeding within the limits of the same
family”[187].
Atkinson[188] seems to have been the first to recognize that these
conditions of the Darwinian primal horde would in practice bring about
the exogamy of the young men. Each one of those driven away could found
a similar horde in which, thanks to jealousy of the chief, the same
prohibition as to sexual intercourse obtained, and in the course of time
these conditions would have brought about the rule which is now known as
law: no sexual intercourse with the members of the horde. After the
advent of totemism the rule would have changed into a different form: no
sexual intercourse within the totem.
Andrew Lang[189] declared himself in agreement with this explanation of
exogamy. But in the same book he advocates the other theory of Durkheim
which explains exogamy as a consequence of the totem laws. It is not
altogether easy to combine the two interpretations; in the first case
exogamy would have existed before totemism; in the second case it would
be a consequence of it[190].
3
Into this darkness psychoanalytic experience throws one single ray of
light.
The relation of the child to animals has much in common with that of
primitive man. The child does not yet show any trace of the pride which
afterwards moves the adult civilized man to set a sharp dividing line
between his own nature and that of all other animals. The child
unhesitatingly attributes full equality to animals; he probably feels
himself more closely related to the animal than to the undoubtedly
mysterious adult, in the freedom with which he acknowledges his needs.
Not infrequently a curious disturbance manifests itself in this
excellent understanding between child and animal. The child suddenly
begins to fear a certain animal species and to protect himself against
seeing or touching any individual of this species. There results the
clinical picture of _animal phobia_, which is one of the most frequent
among the psychoneurotic diseases of this age and perhaps the earliest
form of such an ailment. The phobia is as a rule in regard to animals
for which the child has until then shown the liveliest interest and has
nothing to do with the individual animal. In cities the choice of
animals which can become the object of phobia is not great. They are
horses, dogs, cats, more seldom birds, and strikingly often very small
animals like bugs and butterflies. Sometimes animals which are known to
the child only from picture books and fairy stories become objects of
the senseless and inordinate anxiety which is manifested with these
phobias; it is seldom possible to learn the manner in which such an
unusual choice of anxiety has been brought about. I am indebted to Dr
Karl Abraham for the report of a case in which the child itself
explained its fear of wasps by saying that the colour and the stripes of
the body of the wasp had made it think of the tiger of which, from all
that it had heard, it might well be afraid.
The animal phobias have not yet been made the object of careful
analytical investigation, although they very much merit it. The
difficulties of analysing children of so tender an age have probably
been the motive of such neglect. It cannot therefore be asserted that
the general meaning of these illnesses is known, and I myself do not
think that it would turn out to be the same in all cases. But a number
of such phobias directed against larger animals have proved accessible
to analysis and have thus betrayed their secret to the investigator. In
every case it was the same: the fear at bottom was of the father, if the
children examined were boys, and was merely displaced upon the animal.
Every one of any experience in psychoanalysis has undoubtedly seen such
cases and has received the same impression from them. But I can refer to
only a few detailed reports on the subject. This is an accident of the
literature of such cases, from which the conclusion should not be drawn
that our general assertion is based on merely scattered observation. For
instance I mention an author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has very
intelligently occupied himself with the neuroses of childhood. He tells,
in relating the history of an illness, that a nine year old boy suffered
from a dog phobia at the age of four. “When he saw a dog running by on
the street he wept and cried: ‘Dear dog, don’t touch me, I will be
good.’” By “being good” he meant “not to play violin any more” (to
practise onanism)[A].
The same author later sums up as follows: “His dog phobia is really his
fear of the father displaced upon the dog, for his peculiar expression:
‘Dog, I will be good’--that is to say, I will not masturbate--really
refers to the father who has forbidden masturbation.” He then adds
something in a note which fully agrees with my experience and at the
same time bears witness to the abundance of such experiences: “such
phobias (of horses, dogs, cats, chickens and other domestic animals)
are, I think, at least as prevalent as _pavor nocturnus_ in childhood,
and usually reveal themselves in the analysis as a displacement of fear
from one of the parents to animals. I am not prepared to assert that the
wide-spread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism.”
I reported the “Analysis of the Phobia of a five-year-old Boy”[191]
which the father of the little patient had put at my disposal. It was a
fear of horses as a result of which the boy refused to go on the street.
He expressed his apprehension that the horse would come into the room
and bite him. It proves that this was meant to be the punishment for his
wish that the horse should fall over (die). After assurances had
relieved the boy of his fear of his father, it proved that he was
fighting against wishes whose content was the absence (departure or
death) of the father. He indicated only too plainly that he felt the
father to be his rival for the favour of the mother, upon whom his
budding sexual wishes were by dark premonitions directed. He therefore
had the typical attitude of the male child to its parents which we call
the ‘Oedipus complex’ in which we recognize the central complex of the
neuroses in general. Through the analysis, of ‘little John’ we have
learnt a fact which is very valuable in relation to totemism, namely,
that under such conditions the child displaces a part of its feelings
from the father upon some animal.
Analysis showed the paths of association, both significant and
accidental in content, along which such a displacement took place. It
also allowed one to guess the motives for the displacement. The hate
which resulted from the rivalry for the mother could not permeate the
boy’s psychic life without being inhibited; he had to contend with the
tenderness and admiration which he had felt for his father from the
beginning, so that the child assumed a double or ambivalent emotional
attitude towards the father and relieved himself of this ambivalent
conflict by displacing his hostile and anxious feelings upon a
substitute for the father. The displacement could not, however, relieve
the conflict by bringing about a smooth division between the tender and
the hostile feelings. On the contrary, the conflict was continued in
reference to the object to which displacement has been made and to which
also the ambivalence spreads. There was no doubt that little John had
not only fear, but respect and interest for horses. As soon as his fear
was moderated he identified himself with the feared animal; he jumped
around like a horse, and now it was he who bit the father[192]. In
another stage of solution of the phobia he did not scruple to identify
his parents with other large animals[193].
We may venture the impression that certain traits of totemism return as
a negative expression in these animal phobias of children. But we are
indebted to S. Ferenczi for a beautiful individual observation of what
must be called a case of positive totemism in the child[194]. It is true
that with the little Arpád, whom Ferenczi reports, the totemic interests
do not awaken in direct connexion with the Oedipus complex, but on the
basis of a narcistic premise, namely, the fear of castration. But
whoever looks attentively through the history of little John will also
find there abundant proof that the father was admired as the possessor
of large genitals and was feared as threatening the child’s own
genitals. In the Oedipus as well as in the castration complex the father
plays the same rôle of feared opponent to the infantile sexual
interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the
punishment he threatens[195].
When little Arpád was two and a half years old he once tried, while at a
summer resort, to urinate into the chicken coop, and on this occasion a
chicken bit his penis or snapped at it. When he returned to the same
place a year later he became a chicken himself, was interested only in
the chicken coop and in everything that occurred there, and gave up
human speech for cackling and crowing. During the period of
observation, at the age of five, he spoke again, but his speech was
exclusively about chickens and other fowl. He played with no other toy
and sang only songs in which there was something about poultry. His
behaviour towards his totem animal was subtly ambivalent, expressing
itself in immoderate hating and loving. He loved best to play killing
chickens. “The slaughtering of poultry was quite a festival for him. He
could dance around the animals’ bodies for hours at a time in a state of
intense excitement[196].” But then he kissed and stroked the slaughtered
animal, and cleaned and caressed the chicken effigies which he himself
had ill-used.
Arpád himself saw to it that the meaning of his curious activity could
not remain hidden. At times he translated his wishes from the totemic
method, of expression back into that of everyday life. “Now I am small,
now I am a chicken. When I get bigger I shall be a fowl. When I am
bigger still, I shall be a cock.” On another occasion he suddenly
expressed the wish to eat a “potted mother” (by analogy, potted fowl).
He was very free with open threats of castration against others, just as
he himself had received them on account of onanistic preoccupation with
his penis.
According to Ferenczi there was no doubt as to the source of his
interest in the activities of the chicken yard: “The continual sexual
activity between cock and hen, the laying of eggs and the creeping out
of the young brood”[197] satisfied his sexual curiosity which really was
directed towards human family life. His object wishes have been formed
on the model of chicken life when we find him saying to a woman
neighbour: “I am going to marry you and your sister and my three cousins
and the cook; no, instead of the cook I’ll marry my mother.”
We shall be able to complete our consideration of these observations
later; at present we will only point out two traits that show a valuable
correspondence with totemism: the complete identification with the totem
animal[198], and the ambivalent affective attitude towards it. In view
of these observations we consider ourselves justified in substituting
the father for the totem animal in the male’s formula of totemism. We
then notice that in doing so we have taken no new or especially daring
step. For primitive men say it themselves and, as far as the totemic
system is still in effect to-day, the totem is called ancestor and
primal father. We have only taken literally an expression of these races
which ethnologists did not know what to do with and were therefore
inclined to put it into the background. Psychoanalysis warns us, on the
contrary, to emphasize this very point and to connect it with the
attempt to explain totemism[199].
The first result of our substitution is very remarkable. If the totem
animal is the father, then the two main commandments of totemism, the
two taboo rules which constitute its nucleus,--not to kill the totem
animal and not to use a woman belonging to the same totem for sexual
purposes,--agree in content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who slew his
father and took his mother to wife, and also with the child’s two primal
wishes whose insufficient repression or whose re-awakening forms the
nucleus of perhaps all neuroses. If this similarity is more than a
deceptive play of accident it would perforce make it possible for us to
shed light upon the origin of totemism in prehistoric times. In other
words, we should succeed in making it probable that the totemic system
resulted from the conditions underlying the Oedipus complex, just as the
animal phobia of ‘little John’ and the poultry perversion of ‘little
Arpád’ resulted from it. In order to trace this possibility we shall in
what follows study a peculiarity of the totemic system or, as we may
say, of the totemic religion, which until now could hardly be brought
into the discussion.
4
W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was a physicist, philologist,
Bible critic, and archæologist, a many-sided as well as keen and
free-thinking man, expressed the assumption in his work, _The Religion
of the Semites_[200], published in 1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the
so-called _totem feast_, had, from the very beginning, formed an
integral part of the totemic system. For the support of this supposition
he had at his disposal at that time only a single description of such an
act from the year 500 <small>A.D.</small>; he knew, however, how to give a high degree
of probability to his assumption through his analysis of the nature of
sacrifice among the old Semites. As sacrifice assumes a godlike person
we are dealing here with an inference from a higher phase of religious
rite to its lowest phase in totemism.
I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s excellent book[201] those
statements about the origin and meaning of the sacrificial right which
are of great interest to us; I shall omit the only too numerous tempting
details as well as the parts dealing with all later developments. In
such an excerpt it is quite impossible to give the reader any sense of
the lucidity or of the argumentative force of the original.
Robertson Smith shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part
of the rite of old religions. It plays the same rôle in all religions,
so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose
effects were everywhere the same.
But the sacrifice--the holy action [Greek: κατεξογη katezogê] (sacrificium
[Greek: ἱερουργἱα ieronrgia])--originally meant something different from what
later times understood by it: the offering to the deity in order to
reconcile him or to incline him to be favourable. The profane use of the
word was afterwards derived from the secondary sense of self-denial. As
is demonstrated the first sacrifice was nothing else than “an act of
social fellowship between the deity and his worshipper”.
Things to eat and drink were brought as sacrifice; man offered to his
god the same things as those on which he himself lived, flesh, cereals,
fruits, wine and oil. Only in regard to sacrificial flesh did there
exist restrictions and exceptions. The god partakes of the animal
sacrifices with his worshippers while the vegetable sacrifices are left
to him alone. There is no doubt that animal sacrifices are older and at
one time were the only forms of sacrifice. The vegetable sacrifices
resulted from the offering of the first-fruits and correspond to a
tribute to the lord of the soil and the land. But animal sacrifice is
older than agriculture.
Linguistic survivals make it certain that the part of the sacrifice
destined for the god was looked upon as his real food. This conception
became offensive with the progressive dematerialization of the deity,
and was avoided by offering the deity only the liquid part of the meal.
Later the use of fire, which made the sacrificial flesh ascend in smoke
from the altar, made it possible to prepare human food in such a way
that it was more suitable for the deity. The drink sacrifice was
originally the blood of the sacrificed animals; wine was used later as a
substitute for the blood. Primitive man looked upon wine as the “blood
of the grape”, as our poets still call it.
The oldest form of sacrifice, older than the use of fire and the
knowledge of agriculture, was therefore the sacrifice of animals, whose
flesh and blood the god and his worshippers ate together. It was
essential that both participants should receive their shares of the
meal.
Such a sacrifice was a public ceremony, the celebration of a whole clan.
As a matter of fact all religion was a public affair; religious duty was
a part of the social obligation. Sacrifice and festival go together
among all races; each sacrifice entails a holiday and no holiday can be
celebrated without a sacrifice. The sacrificial festival was an occasion
for joyously transcending one’s own interests and emphasizing social
community and community with god.
The ethical power of the public sacrificial feast was based upon primal
conceptions of the meaning of eating and drinking in common. To eat and
drink with some one was at the same time a symbol and a confirmation of
social community and of the assumption of mutual obligations; the
sacrificial eating gave direct expression to the fact that the god and
his worshippers are communicants, thus confirming all their other
relations. Customs that to-day still are in force among the Arabs of the
desert prove that the binding force resulting from the common meal is
not a religious factor but that the subsequent mutual obligations are
due to the act of eating itself. Whoever has shared the smallest bite
with such a Bedouin, or has taken a swallow of his milk, need not fear
him any longer as an enemy, but may be sure of his protection and help.
Not indeed, forever, strictly speaking this lasts only while it may be
assumed that the food partaken remains in the body. So realistically is
the bond of union conceived; it requires repetition to strengthen it and
make it endure.
But why is this binding power ascribed to eating and drinking in common?
In the most primitive societies there is only one unconditional and
never failing bond, that of kinship. The members of a community stand by
each other jointly and severally, a kin is a group of persons whose life
is so bound into a physical unity that they can be considered as parts
of a common life. In case of the murder of one of this kin they
therefore do not say: the blood of so and so has been spilt, but our
blood has been spilt. The Hebraic phrase by which the tribal relation is
acknowledged is: “Thou art my bone and my flesh”. Kinship therefore
signifies having part in a general substance. It is natural then that it
is based not only upon the fact that we are a part of the substance of
our mother who has borne us, and whose milk nourished us, but also that
the food eaten later through which the body is renewed, can acquire and
strengthen kinship. If one shared a meal with one’s god the conviction
was thus expressed that one was of the same substance as he; no meal was
therefore partaken with any one recognized as a stranger.
The sacrificial repast was therefore originally a feast of the kin,
following the rule that only those of kin could eat together. In our
society the meal unites the members of the family; but the sacrificial
repast has nothing to do with the family. Kinship is older than family
life; the oldest families known to us regularly comprised persons who
belonged to various bonds of kinship. The men married women of strange
clans and the children inherited the clan of the mother; there was no
kinship between the man and the rest of the members of the family. In
such a family there was no common meal. Even to-day savages eat apart
and alone, and the religious prohibitions of totemism as to eating often
make it impossible for them to eat with their wives and children.
Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal. There was, as we have heard,
no meeting of the kin without animal sacrifice, but, and this is
significant, no animal was slaughtered except for such a solemn
occasion. Without any hesitation the people ate fruits, game and the
milk of domestic animals, but religious scruples made it impossible for
the individual to kill a domestic animal for his own use. There is not
the least doubt, says Robertson Smith, that every sacrifice was
originally a clan sacrifice, and that the _killing of a sacrificial
animal_ originally belonged to those acts which were _forbidden to the
individual and were only justified if the whole kin assumed the
responsibility_. Primitive men had only one class of actions, which were
thus characterized, namely, actions which touched the holiness of the
kin’s common blood. A life which no individual might take and which
could be sacrificed only through the consent and participation of all
the members of the clan was on the same plane as the life of a member of
the kin. The rule that every guest of the sacrificial repast must
partake of the flesh of the sacrificial animal, had the same meaning as
the rule that the execution of a guilty member of the kin must be
performed by the whole kin. In other words: the sacrificial animal was
treated like one of kin; _the sacrificing community, its god, and the
sacrificial animal were of the same blood_, and the members of a clan.
On the basis of much evidence Robertson Smith identifies the sacrificial
animal with the old totem animal. In a later age there were two kinds of
sacrifices, those of domestic animals which usually were also eaten, and
the unusual sacrifice of animals which were forbidden as being unclean.
Further investigation then shows that these unclean animals were holy
and that they were sacrificed to the gods to whom they were holy, that
these animals were originally identified with the gods themselves and
that at the sacrifice the worshippers in some way emphasized their blood
relationship to the god and to the animal. But this difference between
usual and ‘mystic’ sacrifices does not hold good for still earlier
times. Originally all animals were holy, their meat was forbidden and
might be eaten only on solemn occasions, with the participation of the
whole kin. The slaughter of the animal amounted to the spilling of the
kin’s blood and had to be done with the same precautions and assurances
against reproach.
The taming of domestic animals and the rise of cattle-breeding seems
everywhere to have put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism of
earliest times[202]. But such holiness as still clung to domestic
animals in what was now a ‘pastoral’ religion, is sufficiently distinct
for us to recognize its totemic character. Even in late classical times
the rite in several localities prescribed flight for the sacrificer
after the sacrifice, as if to escape revenge. In Greece the idea must
once have been general that the killing of an ox was really a crime. At
the Athenian festival of the Bouphonia a formal trial, to which all the
participants were summoned, was instituted after the sacrifice. Finally
it was agreed to put the blame for the murder upon the knife, which was
then cast into the sea.
In spite of the dread which protects the life of the animal as being of
kin, it became necessary to kill it from time to time in solemn
conclave, and to divide its flesh and blood among the members of the
clan. The motive which commands this act reveals the deepest meaning of
the essence of sacrifice. We have heard that in later times every eating
in common, the participation in the same substance which entered into
their bodies, established a holy bond between the communicants; in
oldest time this meaning seemed to be attached only to participation in
the substance of a holy sacrifice. _The holy mystery of the sacrificial
death was justified in that only in this way could the holy bond be
established which united the participants with each other and with their
god[203]._
This bond was nothing else than the life of the sacrificial animal which
lived on its flesh and blood and was shared by all the participants by
means of the sacrificial feast. Such an idea was the basis of all the
_blood bonds_ through which men in still later times became pledged to
each other. The thoroughly realistic conception of consanguinity as an
identity of substance makes comprehensible the necessity of renewing it
from time to time through the physical process of the sacrificial
repast.
We will now stop quoting from Robertson Smith’s train of thought in
order to give a condensed summary of what is essential in it. When the
idea of private property came into existence sacrifice was conceived as
a gift to the deity, as a transfer from the property of man to that of
the god. But this interpretation left all the peculiarities of the
sacrificial ritual unexplained. In oldest times the sacrificial animal
itself had been holy and its life inviolate; it could be taken only in
the presence of the god, with the whole tribe taking part and sharing
the guilt in order to furnish the holy substance through the eating of
which the members of the clan assured themselves of their material
identity with each other and with the deity. The sacrifice was a
sacrament, and the sacrificial animal itself was one of the kin. In
reality it was the old totem animal, the primitive god himself through
the slaying and eating of whom the members of the clan revived and
assured their similarity with the god.
From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice Robertson Smith drew the
conclusion that the periodic killing and eating of the totem before the
period when the _anthropomorphic deities were venerated_ was an
important part of totem religion. The ceremonial of such a totem feast
was preserved for us, he thought, in the description of a sacrifice in
later times. Saint Nilus tells of a sacrificial custom of the Bedouins
in the desert of Sinai towards the end of the fourth century <small>A.D.</small> The
victim, a camel, was bound and laid upon a rough altar of stones; the
leader of the tribe made the participants walk three times around the
altar to the accompaniment of song, inflicted the first wound upon the
animal and greedily drank the spurting blood; then the whole community
threw itself upon the sacrifice, cut off pieces of the palpitating flesh
with their swords and ate them raw in such haste that in a short
interval between the rise of the morning star, for whom this sacrifice
was meant, and its fading before the rays of the sun, the whole
sacrificial animal, flesh, skin, bones, and entrails, were devoured.
According to every testimony this barbarous rite, which speaks of great
antiquity, was not a rare custom but the general original form of the
totem sacrifice, which in later times underwent the most varied
modifications.
Many authors have refused to grant any weight to this conception of the
totem feast because it could not be strengthened by direct observation
at the stage of totemism. Robertson Smith himself has referred to
examples in which the sacramental meaning of sacrifices seems certain,
such as the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and others which recall the
conditions of the totem feast, the bear sacrifices of the bear tribe of
the _Ouataouaks_ in America, and the bear festival of the Ainus in
Japan. Frazer has given a full account of these and similar cases in the
two divisions of his great work that have last appeared[204]. An Indian
tribe in California which reveres the buzzard, a large bird of prey,
kills it once a year with solemn ceremony, whereupon the bird is mourned
and its skin and feathers preserved. The Zuni Indians in New Mexico do
the same thing with their holy turtle.
In the _Intichiuma_ ceremonies of Central Australian tribes a trait has
been observed which fits in excellently with the assumptions of
Robertson Smith. Every tribe that practises magic for the increase of
its totem, which it cannot eat itself, is bound to eat a part of its
totem at the ceremony before it can be touched by the other tribes.
According to Frazer the best example of the sacramental consumption of
the otherwise forbidden totem is to be found among the Bini in West
Africa, in connexion with the burial ceremony of this tribe[205].
But we shall follow Robertson Smith in the assumption that the
sacramental killing and the common consumption of the otherwise
forbidden totem animal was an important trait of the totem
religion[206].
5
Let us now envisage the scene of such a totem meal and let us embellish
it further with a few probable features which could not be adequately
considered before. Thus we have the clan, which on a solemn occasion
kills its totem in a cruel manner and eats it raw, blood, flesh, and
bones. At the same time the members of the clan disguised in imitation
of the totem, mimic it in sound and movement as if they wanted to
emphasize their common identity. There is also the conscious realization
that an action is being carried out which is forbidden to each
individual and which can only be justified through the participation of
all, so that no one is allowed to exclude himself from the killing and
the feast. After the act is accomplished the murdered animal is bewailed
and lamented. The death lamentation is compulsive, being enforced by the
fear of a threatening retribution, and its main purpose is, as Robertson
Smith remarks on an analogous occasion, to exculpate oneself from
responsibility for the slaying[207].
But after this mourning there follows loud festival gaiety accompanied
by the unchaining of every impulse and the permission of every
gratification. Here we find an easy insight into the nature of the
_holiday_.
A holiday is permitted, or rather a prescribed excess, a solemn
violation of a prohibition. People do not commit the excesses which at
all times have characterized holidays, as a result of an order to be in
a holiday mood, but because in the very nature of a holiday there is
excess; the holiday mood is brought about by the release of what is
otherwise forbidden.
But what has mourning over the death of the totem animal to do with the
introduction of this holiday spirit? If men are happy over the slaying
of the totem, which is otherwise forbidden to them, why do they also
mourn it?
We have heard that members of a clan become holy through the consumption
of the totem and thereby also strengthen their identification with it
and with each other. The fact that they have absorbed the holy life with
which the substance of the totem is charged may explain the holiday mood
and everything that results from it.
Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a
substitute for the father, and this really explains the contradiction
that it is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing
of it results in a holiday and that the animal is killed and yet
mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude which to-day still marks the
father complex in our children and so often continues into adult life
also extended to the father substitute of the totem animal.
But if we associate the translation of the totem as given by
psychoanalysis, with the totem feast and the Darwinian hypothesis about
the primal state of human society, a deeper understanding becomes
possible and a hypothesis is offered which may seem fantastic but which
has the advantage of establishing an unexpected unity among a series of
hitherto separated phenomena.
The Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not, of course, allow
for the beginning of totemism. There is only a violent, jealous father
who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons.
This primal state of society has nowhere been observed. The most
primitive organization we know, which to-day is still in force with
certain tribes, is _associations of men_ consisting of members with
equal rights, subject to the restrictions of the totemic system, and
founded on matriarchy, or descent through the mother[208]. Can the one
have resulted from the other, and how was this possible?
By basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we are in a
position to give an answer: One day[209] the expelled brothers joined
forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father
horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained
impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the
use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of
course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal
father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the
brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by
devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast,
which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition
and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many
things began, social organization, moral restrictions and
religion[210].
In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our
supposition, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded
together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the
father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the
father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the
father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and
their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they
had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish
for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to
assert themselves[211]. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense
of guilt was formed which coincided here with the remorse generally
felt. The dead now became stronger than the living had been, even as we
observe it to-day in the destinies of men. What the fathers’ presence
had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic
situation of ‘subsequent obedience’, which we know so well from
psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of
the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the
fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus
they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the _sense of
guilt of the son_, and for this very reason these had to correspond with
the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever disobeyed
became guilty of the two only crimes which troubled primitive
society[212].