Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/414

 374 Totemism in the Evolution of l^eligioH.

he has previously said : " the importance belonging to totem animals as friends or enemies of man is insignificant in comparison with that of ghosts or demons." Surely, we may ask him, what equally " effective process" the belief in ghosts or demons has produced in " early social growth " ? If totems had a power so great, can they have been so utterly insignificant as " friends or enemies of man " ? And are we to deny all correlation between social and religious evolution ? I am aware that M. Marillier denies^ that clan- totems are either regarded as divine or worshipped ; but even he admits that the redskin offers sacrifice to his indi- vidual totem ; while Professor Tylor, in his article on totem- posts, says both that the Killer- whale is a totem " belonging to the Haida-Tsimshian group of tribes," and that " the Killer-whale or Skana is a great spiritual being to the Haida-Tsimshian tribes, who worship and pray to it, blend- ing in their ideas the actual animal and the demon Skana embodied in it." - But as Professor Tylor, when he is making " Remarks on Totemism, with especial reference to some modern theories respecting it," says that the totem- god is " a merely hypothetical being," ^ I will not venture to infer that a totem who is a great spiritual being, worshipped and prayed to, is a totem-god, for, if I did, I might expose my ignorance of the difference between such a spiritual being and a totem-god.

I will therefore retreat on to what is, I hope, safer ground. Unless we are to divorce economics as well as theology from sociology, we may, I trust, regard the " ancient and power- ful action of the totems " on social evolution as constituting a presumption that totemism may have had some economic effects cf its own. One of the most important steps in economic evolution undoubtedly was the domestication of animals. We have only to contrast the condition of those

' n., p. 364.

' Journal of the Anthropological Institute, loc. cit., p. 136. ' Ibid., p. 145.