Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/107

 CORRESPONDENCE.

" TOTEMISM AND ExOGAMY."

(Vol. xxi., pp. 389-96.)

Admiration and gratitude are the principal feelings that Professor Frazer's new book arouses in me. If I add that I have learnt more from Professor Frazer than from any other living writer, I hope to escape every suspicion that my criticism of some of his views implies a depreciation of his greatness as an anthropologist.

By his survey of nearly all available facts relating to totemism, Dr. Frazer has rendered an immense service to the study of early religion, which has for a long time been hampered by extravagant views on the subject, held by a whole school of writers, and not infrequently represented almost as demonstrated truths. It seems to me, however, that in one or two points Dr. Frazer himself has not entirely rid himself of the influence of the old dogmas. He thinks that Robertson Smith's theory of a totem sacrament, which for many years " remained a theory and nothing more, without a single positive instance of such a sacrament being known to support it," has been " strikingly confirmed " by the Central Australian custom of killing and partaking of totems at the time of Intichiuma. He admits that this " sacrament " is not precisely the rite which was divined by Robertson Smith, its object being " not to attain to a mystical community with a deity, but simply to ensure a plentiful supply of food for the rest of the community by means of sorcery." But he still assumes that the Central Australians want to identify themselves with their totems by partaking of them, and for this assumption I find no sufficient evidence in the description by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen of the

F