The Secret of the Totem

CHAPTER XI

MR. FRAZER'S THEORY OF TOTEMISM

Mr. Frazer's latest theory – Closely akin to that of Professor Spencer – Arunta totemism the most archaic – Proof of Arunta primitiveness – Their ignorance of the facts of procreation – But the more primitive south-eastern tribes are not ignorant of the facts – Proof from Mr. Howitt – Yet south-eastern tribes are subject to Mr. Frazer's supposed causes of ignorance – Mr. Frazer's new theory cited – No account taken of primitive tribes of the southern interior – Similar oversight by Mr. Howitt as regards religion – Examples of this oversight – Social advance does not explain the religion of tribes which have not made the social advance – Theory of borrowing needed by Mr. Howitt – Mr. Frazer's suggestion as to the origin of exogamy – Objections to the suggestion.

Throughout these chapters, when there was occasion to mention the totemic theories of Mr. J. G. Frazer, we have spoken of them with reserve, as the theory of this or that date. Fortunately his article, "The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism among the Australian Aborigines," in the Fortnightly Review (September 1905), enables us to report Mr. Frazer's latest, perhaps final, hypothesis. "After years of sounding," he says, "our plummets seem to touch bottom at last."

In essence Mr. Frazer's latest hypothesis is that of Professor Baldwin Spencer. He accepts Pirrauru as "group marriage," and holds that the Arunta retain the most archaic form of totemism now known to exist. In Chapter III. we believe ourselves to have proved that Pirrauru is not "group marriage"; and that the "classificatory names for relationships "do not demonstrate the existence of "group marriage" in the relatively near, or of promiscuity in the very distant past.

In Chapter IV. we show that, by Professor Spencer's statement, the Arunta are in a highly advanced social state for Australians. Inheritance of local office (Alatunjaship) and of the paternal totemic ritual goes in the male, not in the female line of descent, which is confessedly the more archaic. (Mr. Frazer, however, now thinks this point open to doubt.) The institutions are of a local character; and the ceremonials are of what Professor Spencer considers the later and much more complex type. Arunta totemism, Mr. Spencer shows, depends on the idea of ancestral spirits attached to stone churinga nanja, amulets of various forms usually inscribed with archaic patterns, and these churinga nanja, with this belief about them, are not found outside of the Arunta region. Without them, the Arunta system of totemism does not, and apparently cannot exist On this head Mr. Frazer says nothing. For these and many other reasons, most of which have been urged by Dr. Durkheim, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Marett, and other students, we have explained the Arunta system as a late, isolated, and apparently unique institution. As the Arunta ceremonials and institutions, with inheritance in the male line and local magistracies hereditable in the male line, are at the opposite pole from the primitive, while the Arunta totemic system reposes on an isolated superstition connected with manufactured stone objects, and not elsewhere found in Australia, it has seemed vain to regard Arunta totemism as the most archaic.

This, however, is the present hypothesis of Mr. Frazer, as of Mr. Spencer, and he adduces a proof of Arunta primitiveness concerning which too little was said in our Chapter IV. The Arunta system "ignores altogether the intercourse of the sexes as the cause of offspring; and further, it ignores the tie of blood on the maternal as well as the paternal side."250 The theory "denies implicitly, and the natives themselves deny explicitly, that children are the fruit of the commerce of the sexes. So astounding an ignorance of natural causation cannot but date from a past immeasurably remote."251

Now when the Arunta "ignore the tie of blood on the maternal side," they prove too much. They ignore that of which they are not ignorant. Not being idiots, they are well aware of the maternal tie of blood; but they do not permit it to affect the descent of the totem, which is regulated by their isolated superstition, the doctrine of reincarnation combined with the churinga nanja belief. Nor do they ignore fatherhood, as we saw, in affairs of inheritance of local office and totemic rites.

But they do deny that the intercourse of the sexes is the cause of birth of children. Here the interesting point is that tribes much more primitive, the south-eastern tribes, with female reckoning of descent, inheritance in the female line, and no hereditary local moderatorships, are perfectly well aware of all that the more advanced Arunta do not know. Yet they, quite as much as the Arunta, are subject to the causes which, according to Mr. Frazer, produce the Arunta nescience of the facts of procreation. That nescience, says Mr. Frazer, "may be explained easily enough from the habits and modes of thought of savage men." Thus, "first, the sexual act precedes the first symptoms of pregnancy by a considerable interval." Je n'en vois pas la nécessité. Secondly, savage tribes "allow unrestricted licence of intercourse between the sexes under puberty," and thus "familiarise him" (the savage) "with sexual unions that are necessarily sterile; from which he may not unnaturally conclude that the intercourse of the sexes has nothing to do with the birth of offspring." The savage, therefore, explains the arrival of children (at least the Arunta does) by the entrance of a discarnate ancestral spirit into the woman.

The conspicuous and closing objection to this theory is, that savages who are at least as familiar as the Arunta with (1) the alleged remoteness in time of the sexual act from the appearance of the first symptoms of pregnancy (among them, such an act and the symptoms may be synchronous), and (2) with licence before puberty, are not in the Arunta state of ignorance. They are under no illusions on these interesting points.

The tribes of social organisation much more primitive than that of the Arunta, the south-eastern tribes, as a rule, know all about the matter. Mr. Howitt says, "these" (south-eastern) "aborigines, even while counting descent – that is, counting the class names – through the mother, never for a moment feel any doubt, according to my experience, that the children originate solely from the male parent, and only owe their infantine nurture to their mother."252 Mr. Howitt also quotes "the remark made to me in several cases, that a woman is only a nurse who takes care of a man's children for him."253

Here, then, we have very low savages among whom the causes of savage ignorance of procreation, as explained by Mr. Frazer, are present, but who, far from being ignorant, take the line of Athene in the Eumenides of Æschylus. I give Mr. Raley's translation of the passage: —

"The parent of that which is called her child is not really the mother of it, she is but the nurse of the newly conceived fœtus. It is the male who is the author of its being, while she, as a stranger for a stranger (i. e. no blood relation), preserves the young plant…" —Eumenides, 628-631.

These south-eastern tribes, far more primitive than the Arunta in their ceremonials, and in their social organisation, do not entertain that dominant factor in Aruntadom, the belief in the perpetual reincarnation of the souls of the mythical ancestors of the Alcheringa. That belief is a philosophy far from primitive. As each child is, in Arunta opinion, a being who has existed from the beginning of things, he is not, he cannot be, a creature of man's begetting. Sexual acts, say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, only, at most, "prepare" a woman for the reception of a child – who is as old as the world! If the Arunta were experimental philosophers, and locked a girl up in Danae's tower, so that she was never "prepared," they would, perhaps, be surprised if she gave birth to a child.

However that may be, the Arunta nescience about reproduction is not caused by the facts which, according to Mr. Frazer, are common to them with other savages. These facts produce no nescience among the more primitive tribes with female descent, simply because these primitive tribes do not share the far from primitive Arunta philosophy of eternal reincarnation. If the Arunta deny the fact of procreation among the lower animals, that is because "the man and his totem are practically indistinguishable," as Mr. Frazer says. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

The proof of Arunta primitiveness, the only proof, has been their nescience of the facts of generation. But we have demonstrated that, where Mr. Frazer's alleged causes of that nescience are present, among the south-eastern tribes, they do not produce it; while among the Arunta, it is caused by their system of philosophy, which the south-eastern tribes do not possess.

Mr. Frazer next applies his idea to the evolution of a new theory of the Origin of Totemism. Among the Arunta, as we know, each region has its local centre of totemic spirits awaiting reincarnation, one totem for each region. These centres, Oknanikilla, are, in myth, and for all that I know, in fact, burial-places of the primal ancestors, and in each is one, or there may be more, Nanja trees or rocks, permanently haunted by ancestral spirits, all of the same totem, whose stone amulets, churinga nanja, are lying in or on the ground. When a woman feels a living child's part in her being, she knows that it is a spirit of an ancestor of the local totem, haunting the Nanja, and that totem is allotted to the child when born.

Mr. Frazer from these known facts, deduces thus his new theory of the Origin of Totemism. It is best to give it in his own words:254—

"Naturally enough, when she is first aware of the mysterious movement within her, the mother fancies that something has that very moment passed into her body, and it is equally natural that in her attempt to ascertain what the thing is she should fix upon some object that happened to be near her and to engage her attention at the critical moment. Thus if she chanced at the time to be watching a kangaroo, or collecting grass-seed for food, or bathing in water, or sitting under a gum-tree, she might imagine that the spirit of a kangaroo, of grass-seed, of water, or of a gum-tree, had passed into her, and accordingly, that when her child was born, it was really a kangaroo, a grass-seed, water, or a gum-tree, though to the bodily eye it presented the outward form of a human being. Amongst the objects on which her fancy might pitch as the cause of her pregnancy we may suppose that the last food she had eaten would often be one. If she had recently partaken of emu flesh or yams she might suppose that the emu or yam, which she had unquestionably taken into her body, had, so to say, struck root and grown up in her. This last, as perhaps the most natural, might be the commonest explanation of pregnancy; and if that was so, we can understand why, among the Central Australian tribes, if not among totemic tribes all over the world, the great majority of totems are edible objects, whether animals or plants.255 Now, too, we can fully comprehend why people should identify themselves, as totemic tribes commonly do, with their totems, to such an extent as to regard the man and his totem as practically indistinguishable. A man of the emu totem, for example, might say, 'An emu entered into my mother at such and such a place and time; it grew up in her, and came forth from her. I am that emu, therefore I am an emu man. I am practically the same as the bird, though to you, perhaps, I may not look like it.' And so with all the other totems. On such a view it is perfectly natural that a man, deeming himself one of his totem species, should regard it with respect and affection, and that he should imagine himself possessed of a power, such as men of other totems do not possess, to increase or diminish it, according to circumstances, for the good of himself and his fellows. Thus the practice of Intichiuma, that is, magical ceremonies, performed by men of a totem for its increase or diminution, would be a natural development of the original germ or stock of totemism.256 That germ or stock, if my conjecture is right, is, in its essence, nothing more or less than an early theory of conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species. This theory of conception is, on the principles of savage thought, so simple and obvious that it may well have occurred to men independently in many parts of the world. Thus we could understand the wide prevalence of totemism among distant races without being forced to suppose that they had borrowed it from each other. Further, the hypothesis accounts for one of the most characteristic features of totemism, namely, the intermingling in the same community of men and women of many different totem stocks. For each person's totem would be determined by what may be called an accident, that is, by the place where his mother happened to be, the occupation in which she was engaged, or the last food she had eaten at the time when she first felt the child in her womb; and such accidents (and with them the totems) would vary considerably in individual cases, though the range of variation would necessarily be limited by the number of objects open to the observation, or conceivable by the imagination, of the tribe. These objects would be chiefly the natural features of the district, and the kinds of food on which the community subsisted; but they might quite well include artificial and even imaginary objects, such as boomerangs and mythical beasts. Even a totem like Laughing Boys, which we find among the Arunta, is perfectly intelligible on the present theory. In fact, of all the things which the savage perceives or imagines, there is none which he might not thus convert into a totem, since there is none which might not chance to impress itself on the mind of the mother, waking or dreaming, at the critical season.

"If we may hypothetically assume, as the first stage in the evolution of totemism, a system like the foregoing, based on a primitive theory of conception, the whole history of totemism becomes intelligible. For in the first place, the existing system of totemism among the Arunta and Kaitish, which combines the principle of conception with that of locality, could be derived from this hypothetical system in the simplest and easiest manner, as I shall point out immediately. And in the second place, the existing system of the Arunta and Kaitish could, in its turn, readily pass into hereditary totemism of the ordinary type, as in fact it appears to be doing in the Umbaia and Nani tribes of Central Australia at present. Thus what may be called conceptional totemism pure and simple furnishes an intelligible starting-point for the evolution of totemism in general. In it, after years of sounding, our plummets seem to touch bottom at last."

How the totemic spirits became localised, is, Mr. Frazer says, "matter of conjecture," and he guesses that, after several women had felt the first recognised signs of maternity, "in the same place, and under the same circumstances " – for example, at the moment of seeing a Witchetty Grub, or a Laughing Boy – the site would become an Oknanikilla haunted by spirits of the Laughing Boy or Grub totem.257 The Arunta view is different; these places are burial-grounds of men all of this or that totem, who have left their churinga nanja there. About these essential parts of the system, Mr. Frazer, as has been observed, says nothing. His theory I do not criticise, as I have already stated my objection to his premises. "The ultimate origin of exogamy …" he says, "remains a problem nearly as dark as ever," but is a matter of deliberate institution. The tribes, already totemic, but not exogamous, were divided into the two exogamous phratries, and still later into the matrimonial classes, which the most pristine tribes do not possess, though they do know about procreation, while the more advanced Arunta, with classes and loss of phratry names, do not know. In the primitive tribes, with no churinga nanja, the totems became hereditary. Among the advanced Arunta, with churinga nanja, the totems did not (like all other things, including the right to work the paternal totemic ritual), become hereditary, though their rites did, which is curious. Consequently, Mr. Frazer suggests, the Arunta did not redistribute the totems so that one totem never occurs in both exogamous phratries; and totems in the region of churinga nanja alone are not exogamous.

Finally the tribes of Central Australia, which we prove to have the more advanced ceremonial, system of inheritance, local magistracies hereditary in the male line, and the matrimonial classes which Mr. Frazer proclaims to be later than the mere phratries of many south-eastern tribes – "are the more backward, and the coastal tribes the more progressive."258