Volume I Part 8 (2/2)

The martyred Pere Rasles, again, writing in 1723,(1) says that one stock of the Outaonaks claims descent from a hare (”the great hare was a man of prodigious size”), while another stock derive their lineage from the carp, and a third descends from a bear; yet they do not scruple, after certain expiatory rites, to eat bear's flesh. Other North American examples are the Kutchin, who have always possessed the system of totems.(2)

(1) Kip's Jesuits in America i. 33.

(2) Dall's Alaska, pp. 196-198.

It is to be noticed, as a peculiarity of Red Indian totemism which we have not observed (though it may exist) in Africa, that certain stocks claim relations with the sun. Thus Pere Le Pet.i.t, writing from New Orleans in 1730, mentions the Sun, or great chief of the Natchez Indians.(1) The totem of the privileged cla.s.s among the Natchez was the sun, and in all myths the sun is regarded as a living being, who can have children, who may be beaten, who bleeds when cut, and is simply on the same footing as men and everything else in the world. Precisely similar evidence comes from South America. In this case our best authority is almost beyond suspicion. He knew the native languages well, being himself a half-caste. He was learned in the European learning of his time; and as a son of the Incas, he had access to all surviving Peruvian stores of knowledge, and could collect without difficulty the testimonies of his countrymen. It will be seen(2) that Don Garcila.s.so de la Vega could estimate evidence, and ridiculed the rough methods and fallacious guesses of Spanish inquirers. Garcila.s.so de la Vega was born about 1540, being the son of an Inca princess and of a Spanish conqueror. His book, Commentarias Reales,(3) was expressly intended to rectify the errors of such Spanish writers as Acosta. In his account of Peruvian religion, Garcila.s.so distinguishes between the beliefs of the tribes previous to the rise of the Inca empire and the sun-wors.h.i.+p of the Incas. But it is plain, from Garcila.s.so's own account and from other evidence, that under the Incas the older faiths and fetichisms survived, in subordination to sun-wors.h.i.+p, just as Pagan superst.i.tions survived in custom and folk-lore after the official recognition of Christianity.

Sun-wors.h.i.+p, in Peru, and the belief in a Supreme Creator there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise with the lower beliefs, and to have been content to allow a certain amount of bowing down in the temples of the elder faiths. According, then, to Garcila.s.so's account of Peruvian totemism, ”An Indian was not looked upon as honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river,(4) or lake, or even from the sea, OR FROM A WILD ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call c.u.n.tur (condor), or some other bird of prey ”.(5) A certain amount of wors.h.i.+p was connected with this belief in kins.h.i.+p with beasts and natural objects. Men offered up to their totems ”what they usually saw them eat”.(6) On the seacoasts ”they wors.h.i.+pped sardines, skates, dog-fish, and, for want of larger G.o.ds, crabs.... There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did not wors.h.i.+p as a G.o.d,” including ”lizards, toads and frogs.” Garcila.s.so (who says they ate the fish they wors.h.i.+pped) gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the beginning men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one human stock from another. ”The one desired to have a G.o.d different from the other.... They only thought of making one different from another.”

When the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed ”splendour and beauty” as contrasted with ”the ugliness and filth of the frogs and other vermin they looked upon as G.o.ds”.(7) Garcila.s.so, of course, does not use the North American word totem (or ote or otem) for the family badge which represented the family ancestors. He calls these things, as a general rule, pacarissa. The sun was the pacarissa of the Incas, as it was of the chief of the Natchez. The pacarissa of other stocks was the lion, bear, frog, or what not. Garcila.s.so accounts for the belief accorded to the Incas, when they claimed actual descent from the sun, by observing(8) that ”there were tribes among their subjects who professed similar fabulous descents, though they did not comprehend how to select ancestors so well as the Incas, but adored animals and other low and earthly objects”. As to the fact of the Peruvian wors.h.i.+p of beasts, if more evidence is wanted, it is given, among others, by Cieza de Leon,(9) who contrasts the adoration of the Roman G.o.ds with that offered in Peru to brutes. ”In the important temple of Pacha-camac (the spiritual deity of Peru) they wors.h.i.+pped a she-fox or vixen and an emerald.” The devil also ”appeared to them and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce”.

Other examples of totemism in South America may be studied in the tribes on the Amazon.(10) Mr. Wallace found the Pineapple stock, the Mosquitoes, Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, Herons, and other totem kindreds. A curious example of similar ideas is discovered among the Bonis of Guiana. These people were originally West Coast Africans imported as slaves, who have won their freedom with the sword. While they retain a rough belief in Gadou (G.o.d) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided into totem stocks with animal names. The red ape, turtle and cayman are among the chief totems.(11)

(1) Kip, ii. 288.

(2) Appendix B.

(3) See translation in Hakluyt Society's Collection.

(4) Like many Greek heroes. Odyssey, iii. 489. ”Orsilochus, the child begotten of Alpheus.”

(5) Comm. Real., i. 75.

(6) Ibid., 53.

(7) Ibid., 102.

(8) Ibid., 83.

(9) Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 183.

(10) Acuna, p. 103; Wallace, Travels on Amazon (1853), pp. 481-506.

(11) Crevaux, Voyages dans l'Amerique du Sud, p. 59.

After this hasty examination of the confused belief in kins.h.i.+p with animals and other natural objects which underlies inst.i.tutions 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,(1) 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.(2) ”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(3) a princely family in Nagpur which claims descent from ”a great hooded snake”. Among the Oraons he found(4) tribes which might not eat young mice (considered a dainty) or tortoises, and a stock which might not eat the oil of the tree which was their totem, nor even sit in its shade. ”The family or tribal names”

(within which they may not marry) ”are usually those of animals or plants, and when this is the case, the flesh of some part of the animal or the fruit of the tree is tabooed to the tribe called after it.”

(1) Dalton, p. 63.

(2) Ibid., p. 189.

(3) Ibid., p. 166.

<script>