Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/17

 Rh descent, and sacredness attached to the animal or other fancied ancestor, you have totemism scarcely to be argued against. Mr. Gomme has found examples in Clan Connolly, derived from Coneely, a seal, the clan holding it unlucky to kill seals, and maintaining that some of their ancestors were changed into seals in ancient times. This is good enough for me; here, I think, we have totemism. It is almost beyond the calculus of chances that such a foolish faith should have arisen accidentally, separately, unconnected with the causes, whatever they may be, which produce totemism among red men, black men, yellow men. But I think we must be extremely cautious in regarding superstitions at large about animals as vestiges of totemism. The whole superstition of metamorphosis may exist apart from totemism. People may believe that witches turn into hares, and souls into spiders or butterflies; they may decline to kill spiders like the Bruces, or to mention salmon; they may wear the salmon as a badge, like the Campbells; they may dress up in the skins of beasts in sacred dances; they may assume names from animals, and object to killing certain animals, and yet totemism may have nothing to do with any of these customs. They are all customs or beliefs which totemists do practise, yet the animal name may be a mere nickname; the wearing of animal skins may have a magical purpose, the badge may be a mere amulet or fancy, the metamorphosis may be not totemistic, but a myth derived from a name, a pun, or from a poetic guess; there may be special causes, in fact, and totemism may have nothing to say in the matter. Is it not plain that a white night-moth may be fancifully or superstitiously called a “soul” from its soft, ghost-like flight in the darkness, though no tribe ever claimed descent from the moth? The birds into which the Huron witch and her son were changed, in Lafitau, were not said to be the totems of the family, any more than a lion, or an elephant, or a mouse was the totem of the Ogre in Puss in Boots. In short, I cannot, even provisionally, call cats, hares, magpies, butterflies,