Mr. Frazer has introduced the term 'sex-totems,' in application to
Australia. This is connected with his theory of the Origin of Totemism.
I cannot quite approve of the term sex-totems.
If in Australia each sex has a protecting animal--the men a bat, the
women an owl--if the slaying of a bat by a woman menaces the death of a
man, if the slaying of an owl by a woman may cause the decease of a man,
all that is very unlike totemism in other countries. Therefore, I ask
Mr. Frazer whether, in the interests of definite terminology, he had not
better give some other name than 'totem' to his Australian sex protecting
animals? He might take for a _local_ fact, a _local_ name, and say 'Sex-
kobong.'
Once more, for even we anthropologists have our bickerings, I would
'hesitate dislike' of this passage in Mr. Frazer's work: {88b}
'When a savage _names himself_ after an animal, calls it his brother, and
refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem.' Distinguo! A
savage does not name _himself_ after his totem, any more than Mr. Frazer
named himself by his clan-name, originally Norman. It was not as when
Miss Betty Amory named herself 'Blanche,' by her own will and fantasy. A
savage _inherits_ his totem name, usually through the mother's side. The
special animal which protects an individual savage (Zapotec, tona;
Guatemalan, nagual; North America, Manitou, 'medicine') is _not_ that
savage's totem. {89a} The nagual, tona, or manitou is selected for each
particular savage, at birth or puberty, in various ways: in America,
North and Central, by a dream in a fast, or after a dream.
('Post-hypnotic suggestion.') But a savage is born to his kin-totem. A
man is born a wolf of the Delawares, his totem is the wolf, he cannot
help himself. But after, or in, his medicine fast and sleep, he may
choose a dormouse or a squirrel for his manitou (tona, nagual) or
_private_ protecting animal. These are quite separate from totems, as
Mr. Max Muller also points out.
Of totems, I, for one, must always write in the sense of Mr. McLennan,
who introduced totemism to science. Thus, to speak of 'sex-totems,' or
to call the protecting animal of each individual a 'totem,' is, I fear,
to bring in confusion, and to justify Mr. Max Muller's hard opinion that
'totemism' is ill-defined. For myself, I use the term in the strict
sense which I have given, and in no other.
Mr. McLennan did not profess, as we saw, to know the origin of totems. He
once made a guess in conversation with me, but he abandoned it. Professor
Robertson Smith did not know the origin of totems. 'The origin of totems
is as much a problem as the origin of local gods.' {89b} Mr. Max Muller
knows the origin: sign-boards are the origin, or one origin. But what
was the origin of sign-boards? 'We carry the pictures of saints on our
banners because we worship them; we don't worship them because we carry
them as banners,' says De Brosses, an acute man. Did the Indians worship
totems because they carved them on sign-boards (if they all did so), or
did they carve them on sign-boards because they worshipped them?