Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/415

 Toiemisin in the Evolution of Religion, 375

savages who have no domestic animals with the civilisation or semi-civilisation which follows in the train of domestica- tion to see that. Now the respect (whether religious or merely social) which is usually shown to the totem-animal is such that any animal capable of domestication would, in the course of generations, become tame under it. Thus, totemism merely as a social institution would naturally and inevitably result in the eventual domestication of those totem-animals which happened to be domesticable, the others would naturally remain wild. Those totem-clans which had been lucky in this lottery would find themselves the owners of a valuable economic possession, a fresh source of motive power, such as the horse or camel, or a permanent food-supply in the form of cows or sheep. The lucky clans would increase and multiply at the expense of the less fortunate — the bulls at the cost of the bears — until the community which had originally consisted of different totem- clans would come to be a tribe in which such distinctions were either not recognised at all or survived only in re- latively unimportant customs. In a word, the economic revolution produced by domestication would entail a social revolution also, and lead to the destruction of the totemistic form of social organisation.

But of all this I am not fortunate enough to convince M. Marillier. As a cause of domestication, he considers totemism at once inadequate and superfluous. He regards it as inadequate because a totem-animal, though respected and spared by the human members of its own clan, is neither respected nor spared by any other clan of the same community, and therefore does not get the chance of grow- ing tame. But this objection is a weapon with two edges, if not more. As Professor Tylor has pointed out, it tells against the Wilken-Frazer theory (adopted by M. Marillier) that a totem-animal is the receptacle of a totemist's "external soul " ; for the wife who kills her husband's totem is in danger of destroying her husband's life. It tells also, I