Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/418

 378 Toteniism in the EDolution of Religion.

totems. The witchetty grub, for instance, is a totem, and has come to be commonly eaten by the Aruntas.^ But the existence of large numbers of wholly inedible totems forbids us supposing that animals are chosen as totems because they are good to eat. We must then suppose that the taboo on the grub as food broke down under the discovery that the grub as food was good. Amongst the Amazulu, cattle might only be eaten as a religious exercise, with the result that the devotion to that particular article of religion became excessive : the pious w ere always mortifying them- selves by a beef diet. Is it an unreasonably wild surmise that the witchetty grub also may originally have been eaten only ceremonially ? In other words, is the " totem sacra- ment " scientifically a wholly inadmissible hypothesis ?

That sacrificial feasts are of immense importance as a means of binding worshippers to their god is admitted by Professor Tylor. That ritual immolation and the sacra- mental meal are especially intimately connected with the sanctity of domesticated animals is admitted, or rather in- sisted upon, by M. Marillier. That such rites go back to times when the animals in question were rather domesticable than as yet domesticated seems also to be conceded. But at that time the animals were, I submit, totems.

What more is required, I will not say to make the totem- sacrament admissible as a hypothesis, but to prove it as a fact ? Is it alleged that a totem cannot be a god ? The Killer-whale is, if not a god, a great spiritual being, wor- shipped and prayed to. Is it that a totem-clan cannot eat its totem ? The Aruntas eat their witchetty grub. Is it that the ritual immolation and sacramental eating of the totem-animal is purely hypothetical ? I have from the first proclaimed that the assumption was but a working hypo- thesis," and I do not claim anything more for it now.

' Horn Scientific Expedition, pt. iv., p. 176 fif.

- History of Religions, p. 156. "We must regard it merely as a working hypothesis that in pre-pastoral times the animal sacrificed and eaten by the totem clan was the totem animal."