Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/421

 Totemism in the Evolution of Religion. 381

totemists. Thus, for instance, self-mutilations, originally designed to make the worshipper resemble his totem in some respect, might continue to be practised even when the people in question had ceased to be totemistic in their social organisation. Worship of the totem-animal might continue even when the animal had ceased to be the totem of a particular totem-clan, and had come to be a tribal deity sacred to all members of the tribe, no matter what clans they belonged to. Now M. Marillier repeatedly argues that various alleged survivals cannot possibly be survivals of totemism, because they are practised by the whole of the tribe in which they are found to exist, and not by one par- ticular clan. To this I believe that I am fully entitled to reply that if such rites, &c., were still practised by a totem- clan they would not be survivals of totemism, they would be totemism itself. The very term " survival " implies that the clan-organisation has given way to some other form of social structure. But so firmly is M. Marillier resolved not to admit the possibility of any transition from totemism to any other stage of religious evolution, that he does not see that he is paying himself with mere words. He lays it down that a totem-deity is one worshipped by a totem-clan, a tribal deity one that is worshipped by a whole tribe, that if an animal sacred to one clan comes to be sacred to the whole tribe, it thereby ceases to be a totem ; therefore, no totem can be a tribal deity ; as long as it is a totem it can- not be a tribal deity ; when it becomes a tribal deity it is not a totem. But this does not in the least show that an animal might not in the course of its history first be a totem and then be a tribal deity — first be worshipped by one clan and then by the whole tribe. However, to M. Marillier " the transformation of cults limited to a totem-clan into cults common to a tribe is unintelligible." " Nothing," he says, " nothing essential to totemism can remain in a religion which has passed beyond the bounds of the totem-clan." And he has ingenious a priori arguments to show that it