Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/391

 The Origin of Totem Names and Beliefs. 37 1

truly primitive times, is not inherited from fathers, but from mothers.

Our authors say that, in some cases, " all the members of a man's family, and all his descendants, and, if he be a chief, all the members of the community over which he rules," may come to share in the benefits of his Nyarong, and in its rites. But all this of chiefs, and oreat-g-randchildren of a known great-grandfather, all this occurring to-day among an imitative and agricultural people with departmental deities and domesticated animals, cannot give us a line to the Origin of Totemism among houseless nomads, who tabu the memory of their dead, and, as a rule, probably reckoned descent on the female side, so that a man could not inherit his father's totem. We must try to see how really early men became totemic. Mr. Frazer observes " it is quite possible that, as some good authorities incline to believe, the clan-totem has been developed out of the individual totem by inheritance," and Miss Alice C. Fletcher has been cited as holding this process to be probable in North America.^ All such theories are based on the beliefs and customs of modern savages advancing, like the American Indians of to-day, towards what is technically styled " bar- barism." It was not in the state of barbarism, but in a savagery no longer extant, that totemism was evolved. Totemism derived from inheritance of a male ancestor's special " spirit-helper " is checked by the essential condi- tions of people who are settled, agricultural, and given to reckoning descent in the male line. No more can be produced, in such a state than " abortive beginnings of totemism." '-' Exogamy is never reached on these lines, and totemism is behind, not in front, of all such peoples. Totemism arose in the period of the Group, not of the family-founding male ancestor.

Messrs. Hose and MacDougall, it is to be noted, do not

' Golden Bough, iii., p. 419, note 5. ■ Hose and MacDougall, op. ciL. p. 211. 2 B 2