Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/99

 retain a rough belief in Gadou (God) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided into totem stocks with animal names. The red ape, turtle, and cayman are among the chief totems.

After this hasty examination of the confused belief in kinship with animals and other natural objects which underlies institutions in Australia, West and South Africa, North and South America, we may glance at similar notions among the non-Aryan races of India. In Dalton's Ethnology of Bengal, he tells us that the Garo clans are divided into maharis or motherhoods. Children belong to the mahari of the mother, just as (in general) they derive their stock name and totem from the mother's side in Australia and among the North American Indians. No man may marry (as among the Red Indians and Australians) a woman belonging to his own stock, motherhood, or mahari. So far the maharis of Bengal exactly correspond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis also take their names from plants and animals, and so forth? We know that the Killis, similar communities among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this. "The Mundaris, like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal distinction the name of some animal, and the flesh of that animal is tabooed to them as food; for example, the eel, the tortoise." This is exactly the state of things in Ashanti. Dalton mentions also a princely family in Nagpur which claims descent from "a great hooded snake." Among