Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/411

 Totemism in the Evolution of Religion. 371

totems at any time, e.g., deities of the sea, lakes, rivers, fountains, sun, moon, stars, wind, earth, and sky--^

Now I might reply that all the natural objects enumerated by M. Marillier do, as a matter of fact, actually occur within our knowledge as totems ; - but I shall not, because then it might be inferred that in my opinion wherever the sun, for instance, was worshipped as a deity he must previously have been venerated as a totem. That is not my opinion. What I have maintained, and do maintain, is that if a community, already having one or more gods, wishes for any reason to add another to its collection, it will probably proceed to worship the new one with a ritual similar to that with which it worships its old-established gods. If the community in question is a totem-clan, the new-comer will be assimilated to the totem-system; if it has passed out of the totem-stage, it will straightway erect the new-comer into a tribal, or local, or national deity, as the case may be, and then we shall have an instance of a nature-power made into a god without ever having served as a totem. The vast majority of the gods known to the antique religions and to savage races may thus have originated in post-totem times, and never have been themselves totems. I submit, therefore, that there is no narrowness in this view. As to its inexactness, I can only say on the one hand that M. Marillier himself conjectures that the sacred cattle of the Damara clans have been assimilated to pre-existing totems, which they have driven out,^ and on the other that both M. Marillier and Professor Tylor ^ fully admit " the'^] immense influence of sacrificial feasts as means of binding societies of worshippers together and to their common divinity." ^

It is now, I imagine, almost superfluous for me to say

' I., p. 221 ; iii., pp. 224, 226; iv., pp. 397, 402. - Frazer, Totemism, pp. 24 and 25. => III., p. 232.

"^ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. i. (New Series), p. 145. 2 P. 2