Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/447

 Totemism, and Religion. 411

own phratry. It does not appear that Lord Avebury tries to explain the origin of this arrangement.

In all discussions we are so apt to misunderstand each other that I must express my regret if I misconceive Lord Avebury ; when he seems to me to hold two contradictory theories, — one, that totemism arose in an age of recognised fatherhood, when children assumed hereditarily the animal name of their father ; the other, that it arose when promis- cuous hordes assumed, for ever, the name of their leader in one generation ; the next leader, of course, might have another name. This remark applies to all theories accord- ing to which the name of one man, woman, or leader becomes stereotyped as the name of a totem-kin, and as the origin of a totem. Why was one of many names of individuals stereotyped as a kin-name or a group-name, before male kinship was known ?

But such stereotyping is possible in much more advanced conditions, with full recognition of paternity, as in Mac- donalds, Mackays, Macfearchars (Farquharsons).

Religion.

Lord Avebury, some fifty years ago, " expressed the belief that the lowest races were without any belief which could be" called religion,^^ and he adheres to that opinion. Mr. Tylor, on the other hand, writes, — " Even in the life of the rudest savage religious belief is associated with intense emotion, with awful reverence, with agonizing terror, with rapt ecstasy when sense and thought utterly transcend the common level of daily life." ^^

I never went so far as Mr. Tylor in this direction, I think.

Thus Lord Avebury's opinion is not that of 7iotre maitre a totis, nor of Dr. Roskoff in Das Religionswesen der Rohesten Naturvblker \ nor is it my own opinion. Indeed, as Lord Avebury quotes me, I have said that Dr. Roskoff " con-

1^ Avebury, p. 138.

^^ Primitive Culture, vol. ii., p. 359 (1873).