Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/374

 42 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

about the tepee, to guard the faithful clansman who has kept the vows of respect for the spirit of the totem and total abstinence from its body. Tylor 1 has shown that at least among the Haidas and the Tlingit of the Pacific coast totemism is chiefly social, having to do only with hospitality and the prohibition of marriage between mem- bers of the same clan, and does not imply the hypothesis of the totem as an ancestor, but rather alludes to the totemic species as having been so closely associated with the real human ancestor that ever afterwards it should be just as closely associated with his descendants. So according to Tylor the theory of Lang, Frazer, and others that the totems represent the gods themselves therein incarnated is erroneous.

All of the fascinating fiction in which the characters are animals cleverly endowed by the story-teller with human attributes must also be left aside. Regarding the various familiar theories for the origin of these tales, we may believe that they are derived as a com- mon heritage from our cave-dwelling and perhaps arboreal ancestors ; that they were first expressed as literature of which we have record, in the Aryan Veda, then handed down from generation to genera- tion, modified ever and anon in adaptation to new environment and often taking short cuts from one race to another through borrow- ing. On the other hand, we may accept the independent origin of the stories in widely separated regions and that the striking resemblances one to another are the natural results of the common inventiveness of the human mind. Indeed, it is an easy and sensible conclusion to these much discussed doctrines to accept both the- ories as not necessarily antagonistic and as working together in the development of folk-lore. At the base of any of these hypotheses there is a common human ancestry and an evolution of the myths concomitantly with that of the mind and body of man.

We must remember that the origin of myth was in the pliocene, when the ancestors of the races of apes and of the races of men were one and the same race. Individuals then had common needs, common hunger, and the consequent thirst for blood. When in the struggle for existence they held one another throat by throat, it was possible to read each other's simple thoughts. So these ape-men instinctively realized their intimate relationship not only with one another but with the animals and plants and other elements of nature surrounding them. It was the easiest explanation of any manifestation of force in whatever form it appeared to project their own impulses and powers into that form.

Then when all men were animals, and all animals were climbing through forests, or roaming over plains, their mental pictures were 1 Journ. of the Anthropological Inst. Aug.-Nov. 1898.

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