Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/374

 354 ^'^^^ Origin of Totem Names and Beliefs.

and, without possessing totemism in full measure, many races retain obvious fragments of the institution.

Mr. Tylor has censured the use of the terms " totems " and " totem-clans " with respect to the Fijians and Samoans, where certain animals, not to be eaten, are believed to be vehicles or shrines of certain gods. It is a very probable conjecture (so probable, I think, as almost to amount to a certainty) that the creatures which are now the shrines of Fijian or Samoan gods of the family, or of higher gods, were once totems in an earlier stage of Samoan and Fijian society and belief. As I have said elsewhere, " In totemistic countries the totem is respected himself, in Samoa the animal is worshipful because a god abides within him. This appears to be a theory by which the reflective Samoans have explained to themselves what was once pure totem- ism." ^ But I must share in Mr. Tylor's protest against using the name of " totem " for a plant or animal which is regarded as the shrine of a god. Such thorough totemists as some of the North American Indians or the Australians do not explain their totems as the shrines of gods, for they have no such gods to serve as explanations. That myth appears to be the Samoan or Fijian way of accounting for the existence of worshipful and friendly plants and animals. Thus, at all events, and unluckily, the phrase "the totem- god " is introduced into our speculations, and the cult of the "totem-god" is confused with the much more limited respect paid by savages to actual totems. However attractive the theory of "the totem-god" may be, we cannot speak of " totems " where a god incarnate in a plant or animal is concerned. Such a deity may be a modified survival of totemism, but a totem he is not. Moreover, it is hardly safe to say that, in the Samoan case, the god is " developed from a totem," we only know that the god has got into suspiciously totemistic society. On the whole, we cannot be too cautious

' Tylor, Remarks on Totemism, pp. 141-143. Myth, Ritual, and Religion, ii., pp. 56-5S. Turner's Samoa, p. 17 {1SS4).