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 the Kaitish, has, so far, operated but faintly. We have been explicit on these points because on them the whole problem of the original form of totemism hinges. In our view, for the reasons stated, the Arunta system of non-exogamous non-hereditary totemism is a peculiarity of comparatively recent institution. But Mr Frazer, and the chief observer of the phenomena, Mr Spencer, consider the Arunta system, non-exogamous and nonhereditary, to be the most archaic form of totemism extant.

As to non-hereditary, we find another report of the facts in Die Aranda und Loritja Stämme, by the Rev. Mr Strehlow, who has a colloquial and philological knowledge of the language of these tribes. As he reports, among other things, that the Aranda (Arunta) in his district inherit their mother's totems, in addition to their “local totems,” they appear to retain an archaic feature from which their local totem system and marriage rules are a departure.

The hereditary maternal totem is, in Mr Strehlow's region, the protective being (altjira) of each Arunta individual.

Are the Arunta “Primitive” or not?—In the whole totemic controversy the question as to whether the non-exogamous non-hereditary totemism of the Arunta or the hereditary and exogamous totemism of the rest of Australia and of totemic mankind, be the earlier, is crucial.

That Arunta totemism is a freak or “sport,” it is argued, is made probable first by the fact that the Arunta inherit all things hereditable in the male line, whereas inheritance in the female descent is earlier. (To this question we return; see below, Male and Female Lines of Descent.) M. Van Gennep argues that tribes in contact, one set having female, the other male, descent, “like the Arunta have combined the systems.” But several northern tribes with male descent of the totem which are not in contact with tribes of female descent show much stronger traces of the “combination” than the Arunta, who intermarry freely with a tribe of female descent, the Urabunna; while the Urabunna, though intermarrying with the Arunta who inherit property and tribal office in the male line, show no traces of “combination.” Thus the effects occur where the alleged causes are not present; and the alleged causes, in the case of the Urabunna and Arunta, do not produce the effects.

Next the Arunta have no names for their main exogamous divisions, these names being a very archaic feature which in many tribes with sub-classes tend to disappear. In absence of phratry names the Arunta are remote from the primitive. M. Van Gennep replies that perhaps the Arunta have not yet made the names, or have not yet borrowed them. This is also the view of Mr Frazer. As he says, the Southern Arunta lived under the rule of eight classes, but of these four were anonymous, till the names for them were borrowed from the north. The people can thus have anonymous exogamous divisions; the two main divisions, or phratries, of the Arunta may, therefore, from the first, have been anonymous.

To this the reply is that people borrow, if they can, what they need. The Arunta found names for their four hitherto anonymous classes to be convenient, so they borrowed them. But when once class-names did, as they do, all that is necessary, the Arunta had no longer any use for the names of the two primary main divisions: these were forgotten; there is nothing to be got by borrowing that; while four Arunta “sub-classes” are gaining their names, the “classes” (phratries or main divisions) have lost them. It is perfectly logical to hold that while things useful, but hitherto anonymous, are gaining names, other things, now totally useless, are losing their names. One process is as natural as the other. In all Australia tribes with two main divisions and no sub-classes, the names of the two main divisions are found, because the names are useful. In several tribes with named sub-classes, which now do the work previously thrown on the main divisions, the names of the main divisions are unknown: the main divisions being now useless, and superseded by the sub-classes. The absence of names of the two main divisions in the Arunta is merely a result, often found, of the rise of the

which, as Mr Frazer declares, are not primitive, but the result of successive later legislative acts of division.

Manifestly on this point the Arunta are at the farthest point from the earliest organization: their loss of phratry names is the consequence of this great advance from the “primitive.”

All Arunta society rests on a theory of reincarnated spirits, a theory minutely elaborated. M Van Gennep asks “why. should this belief not be primitive?” Surely neither the belief in spirits, nor the elaborate working out of the belief connecting spirits with manufactured stone amulets, can have been primitive. Nobody will say that peculiar stone amulets and the Arunta belief about spirits associated with them are primitive. To this M Van Gennep makes no reply.

The Arunta belief that children are spirit-children (ratapa) incarnated is very common in the other central and northern tribes, and, according to Mrs Bates, in Western Australia; Dr Roth reports the same for parts of Queensland. It is alleged by Messrs Spencer and Gillen that the tribes holding this belief deny any connexion between sexual unions and procreation. Mr Strehlow, on the other hand, says that in his region the older Arunta men understand the part of the male in procreation; and that even the children of the Loritja and Arunta understand, in the case of animals. (Here corroboration is desirable and European influence may be asserted.) Dr Roth says that the Tully River blacks of Queensland admit procreation for all other animals, which have no Koi or soul, but not for men, who have souls. (Their theory of human birth, therefore, merely aims primarily at accounting for the spiritual part of man.)

According to Mrs Bates, some tribes in the north of South Australia, tribes with the same “class” names as the Arunta, hold that to have children a man must possess two spirits (ranee). If he has but one, he remains childless. If he has two, he can dream of an animal, or other object, which then passes into his wife, and is born as a child, the animal thus becoming the child's totem. This belief does not appear to apply to; reproduction in the lower animals. It is a spiritual theory of the begetting of a soul incarnated. If a man has but one spirit, he cannot give one to a child, therefore he is childless.

It is clear that this, and all other systems in which reproduction is explained in spiritual terms, can only arise among peoples whose whole mode of thinking is intensely “animistic.” It is also plain that all such myths answer two questions—(1) How does a being of flesh and spirit acquire its spiritual part?—(2) How is it that every human being is in mystical rapport with an animal, plant, or other object, the totem? Manifestly the second question could not arise and need answer before mankind were actually totemists. It may be added that in the south of Western Australia the name for the mythical “Father of All” (a being not there worshipped, though images of him are made and receive some cult at certain, licentious festivals) and the name for “father-stock” is maman, which Mrs Bates finds to be the native term for membrum virile. All this appears to be proof of understanding of the male part in reproduction, though that understanding is now obscured by speculation about spirits.

The question arises then, is the ignorance of procreation, where that ignorance exists, “primitive,” and is the Arunta totemism also “primitive,” being conditioned, as we are told it is, by the unique belief in some churinga? Or is the ignorance due to attempts of native thinkers to account for the spirit in man as a pre-existing entity that has been from the beginning? The former view is that of Messrs Spencer and Gillen, and Mr Frazer. For the latter see Lang, Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, pp. 210-218. We can hardly call people primitive because they have struggled with the problem “how has material man an indwelling spirit?”

Theories of the Origin of Totemic Exogamy.—Since the word “exogamy” as a name for the marriage systems connected (as a rule) with totemism was used by J. F. McLennan in his