Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/19

 Rh Nobody is more apt to believe in totems than myself, and perhaps I am more inclined than Mr. Gomme to think that the Aryans went through a stage of society and culture so very common as this totemism was. Why should the Aryans have been better than other people? The myths of Greece and the ritual of Greece are full of what I regard as very probably totemistic survivals. People may say these were borrowed. They cannot prove it; and, if it is true, so much the worse for the Greeks. But, at the cost of seeming to claim to be the only true believer in totemism, I must protest that I think we cannot be too careful. Mr. Gomme has found some two or three cases of totemism in these countries, mainly in an isle notorious for its verdure and its wrongs, which seem beyond doubt. Others he has found where there is a very strong presumption of totemism. The vast mass of his examples may spring from totemism, but other explanations, and singular causes are admissible. To me it seems premature to “colligate” all those scattered superstitions by the totemistic hypothesis. It may give the enemy who believes in the omnipresence of solar myths turning on a Disease of Language, it may give him occasion to shoot out the tongue. This does not prevent Mr. Gomme’s essay from being most interesting, and, in a few cases, I think conclusive. But it is a long way from presumption to proof. In short, it is true that totemism if once prevalent in Britain would have left behind it just such relics as Mr. Gomme has carefully collected. But the prevalence of these relics does not demonstrate the previous existence of totemism.

Among Mr. Gomme’s possible relics is the custom of wearing beasts’ skins in certain old merry-makings. These are curious; but to “hang a calf-skin on thy recreant limbs” may be practised without totemistic intention. I think Catlin mentions dances of men thus draped, for the purpose of securing luck in the chase. As to names from beasts, even critical totemists derive their personal, as we should say, their Christian names from beasts without any