Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/422

 382 Totemism in the Evolution of Religion.

is impossible for the whole of a tribe to participate in the cult of one and the same totem.

M. Marillier, farther, believing in animal-worship, and not believing in totemism, as a necessary stage in the evolution of religion, is very firm in his demand for evi- dence that a totem is ever the object of a "cult" in the proper sense of the term : the mere respect which, when shown to a non-totem animal, is sufficient evidence to raise animal-worship to a cult, does not suffice, when paid to a totem-animal, to convince M. Marillier that the totem is the object of a veritable cult. The extremely elaborate rites and ceremonies, however, which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's tribes spend weeks and months in celebrating with the most meticulous care and the profoundest reverence, will, I trust, amount to the dimensions of a cult in M. Marillier's eyes. If they do, he will discover this remarkable fact : that the whole of the tribe, without regard to totem-clans, are present at the celebration of each and every totem-rite and cult. Not only so, but any member of the tribe may by invitation be the celebrant of any rite, and " need not of necessity belong to the totem with which the ceremony is concerned." In fact the various clans which compose the tribe have come to " pool " the whole of their cults. Thus we have the very state of things which M. Marillier pronounces uninteUigible and impossible : a cult which originally belonged to one particular clan is thrown open to the whole tribe ; in M. Marillier's words, " a cult limited to a totem-clan is transformed into a cult common to a tribe ; " it has " passed beyond the bounds of the totem- clan." Will M. Marillier say that " nothing essential to totemism remains" in it?

It is obvious that in these Engwura ceremonies we have the results of a process analogous to that by which in more developed societies a pantheon is produced — only we have in place of a pantheon what perhaps I may call a " panto- temeion." The transition from totemism, as it is known