Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/338

 320 Reviews.

is developed. It is in contradiction, too, with all we know of the constitution of genuine totem-clans. Such clans are essentially autonomous societies, each having its own life and morale, and attached to similar societies by a very loose bond — a bond which can only become strengthened according as the individual clans tend to merge one in the other, and lose with their autonomy their specific nature, in order to serve as material for a social organisa- tion of another and a higher kind.

The rites then must have originally had some other object. They must have been practised by each clan in its own exclusive interest ; and since the use of the totem for food was forbidden to the clan, the practice must have been of a religious and not of an economic nature. No doubt it was intended to perpetuate the species, though not for the purpose of forming an agreed contribu- tion to the alimentary resources of the tribe. The totem is hterally the condition of the existence of the clan. In order to have a Kangaroo-clan there must be kangaroos. The men who bear that name must be able to revivify their kangaroo-quality at intervals by sacramental communion. They cannot do so if the kangaroo-species die out. The Intichiuma rites were destined to prevent this mis- fortune. They were rites analogous to those which, in higher reli- gions, are intended to cherish and continue the life of the god. In course of time, however, the idea changed. The rites were still practised ; but they became magical. A nascent ancestor-worship intervened, itself a transformation of totemism. That totemism undergoes transformation into ancestor-worship, let me observe parenthetically, is a development not unknown elsewhere ; and the transformation, as I have tried to show, is found to be con- nected with the change from mother-right to father-right, and the consequent evolution of social organisation. ^ Among the Arunta, too, M. Durkheim argues, the Intichiuma have been developing into a tribal rather than a totemic ceremony. The members of the totem-group, it is true, still take the active part in the ceremonies, but the other tribesmen are admitted as reverent spectators, and they are subjected to ritual prescriptions with regard to the totem, to which they were formerly strange. The clan-religion has in fact become to a great extent tribal. The different cults are on their way to merge in a new system more general and more unified.

' Folk-Lore, vol. xii., p. 33.