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166 in 1869 the Scotchman MacLennan attracted general interest to the phenomena of totemism, which until then had been considered merely as curiosities, by his conjecture that a large number of customs and usages in various old as well as modern societies were to be taken as remnants of a totemic epoch. Science has since then fully recognized this significance of totemism. I quote a passage from the “Elements of the Psychology of Races” by W. Wundt (1912), as the latest utterance on this question: “Taking all this together it becomes highly probable that a totemic culture was at one time the preliminary stage of every later evolution as well as a transition stage between the state of primitive man and the age of gods and heroes.”

It is necessary for the purposes of this chapter to go more deeply into the nature of totemism. For reasons that will be evident later I here give preference to an outline by S. Reinach, who in the year 1900 sketched the following Code du totémism in twelve articles, like a catechism of the totemic religion:

1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up individual animals of these species and take care of them.