Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/180

 164 The Origiii of Exogamy and Totemism.

group names, and had forgotten how they got the names, (all known groups having long been named), it was quite inevitable that men, always speculative, should ask them- selves, — "What is the nature of this connection between us and the animals whose names we bear? It must be a connection of the closest and most important kind." This conclusion, I repeat, was inevitable, given the savage way of thinking about names. Will any anthropologist deny this assertion }

Probably the mere idea of a mystic connection between themselves and their name-giving animals set the groups upon certain superstitious acts and abstentions in regard to these animals. But being men, and as such speculative, and expressing the results of their speculations in myths, they would not rest till they had evolved myths as to the precise nature of the connection between themselves and their name-giving animals, the connection indicated by their names. There are scores of such myths.

Now, men who had arrived at this point could not be so inconceivably unobservant as to be unaware of the blood- connection between mother and children indicated in the obvious facts of birth. A group may not have understood the facts of reproduction and procreation (as the Arunta are said not to have understood them), but the facts of blood-connection, and of the relation of the blood to the life, could escape no human beings.^^ As.savages undeniably do not usually draw the line between beasts and other things on one side, and men on the other, as we do, it was natural for some of them to suppose that the animal bearing the human group name, and therefore solidaire with the group, was united with it, as the members of the human group themselves were visibly united, namely, by the blood-bond. The animal is thus explained as men's ancestor, or brother, or primal ancestral form. (Or the man's soul is an eman- ation from a supposed primal being of animal form.) This


 * Cf. The Golden Bough (2nd ed.), vol i., pp. 360-2.