Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/396

 376 The Origin of Totem Names and Beliefs.

not adopted by the savages on a dream-warning ; each man or woman for himself or herself : nor is it chosen for each child at birth, nor by a diviner, as is the nagual, bush- soul, nyarong of Saraw^ak^ or ihe secret animal friend of each individual Australian. A savage inherits his group- totem name. The name of any plant or animal which he may adopt for himself, or have assigned to him as a per- sonal name by his parents, or, so to speak, godparents, is not his totem. My meaning is, I repeat, that my con- jecture is only concerned with hereditary group-totems and hereditary totem-names of kindreds. No others enter into my conjecture as to origin. What some call "personal- totems," adopted by the individual, or selected by others for him after his birth, such as the Calabar "bush-soul/' the Sarawak nyarong, the Central American nagiial, the Banks Island tamaniii, and the analogous special animal of the Australian tribesman (observed chiefly, as far as I know, by Mr. Howitt^ and Mrs. Langloh Parker), do not here con- cern me. They are not hereditary group-names.

The Author's own Conjecture. I now approach my own conjecture as to the origins of the genuine, hereditary, exogamous totemism of groups of kin, (real or imagined). Totemism as we know it, especially in some tribes of North America and in Australia, has cer- tainly, as a necessary condition, that state of mind in which man regards all the things in the world as very much on a level in personality : the beasts being even more powerful than himself. Were it not so, the totem myths about human descent from beasts and plants — about friendlybeasts, beasts who may marry men, and about metamorphoses — could not have been invented and believed, even to whatever extent myths are believed. So far, there is probably no difference of opinion among anthropologists. The same mental condition reveals itself in the habit of adopting, as we have

' J A. I., vol. xiii.