Volume I Part 9 (1/2)
(4) Ibid., p. 254.
An excellent sketch of totemism in India is given by Mr. H. H. Risley of the Bengal Civil Service:--(1)
(1) The Asiatic Quarterly, No. 3, Essay on ”Primitive Marriage in Bengal.”
”At the bottom of the social system, as understood by the average Hindu, stands a large body of non-Aryan castes and tribes, each of which is broken up into a number of what may be called totemistic exogamous septs. Each sept bears the name of an animal, a tree, a plant, or of some material object, natural or artificial, which the members of that sept are prohibited from killing, eating, cutting, burning, carrying, using, etc.”(1)
(1) Here we may note that the origin of exogamy itself is merely part of a strict totemistic prohibition. A man may not ”use” an object within the totem kin, nor a woman of the kin. Compare the Greek idiom (Greek text omitted).
Mr. Risley finds that both Kolarians, as the Sonthals, and Dravidians, as the Oraons, are in this state of totemism, like the Hos and Mundas.
It is most instructive to learn that, as one of these tribes rises in the social scale, it sloughs off its totem, and, abandoning the common name derived from bird, beast, or plant, adopts that of an eponymous ancestor. A tendency in this direction has been observed by Messrs.
Fison and Howitt even in Australia. The Mahilis, Koras and Kurmis, who profess to be members of the Hindu community, still retain the totemistic organisation, with names derived from birds, beasts and plants. Even the Jagannathi k.u.mhars of Orissa, taking rank immediately below the writer-caste, have the totems tiger, snake, weasel, cow, frog, sparrow and tortoise. The sub-castes of the Khatlya k.u.mhars explain away their totem-names ”as names of certain saints, who, being present at Daksha's Horse-sacrifice, transformed themselves into animals to escape the wrath of Siva,” like the G.o.ds of Egypt when they fled in b.e.s.t.i.a.l form from the wrath of Set.
Among the non-Aryan tribes the marriage law has the totemistic sanction.
No man may marry a woman of his totem kin. When the totem-name is changed for an eponym, the non-Aryan, rising in the social scale, is practically in the same position as the Brahmans, ”divided into exogamous sections (gotras), the members of which profess to be descended from the mythical ris.h.i.+ or inspired saint whose name the gotra bears”. There is thus nothing to bar the conjecture that the exogamous gotras of the whole Brahmans were once a form of totem-kindred, which (like aspiring non-Aryan stocks at the present day) dropped the totem-name and renamed the septs from some eponymous hero, medicine-man, or Ris.h.i.+.
Constant repet.i.tion of the same set of facts becomes irksome, and yet is made necessary by the legitimate demand for trustworthy and abundant evidence. As the reader must already have reflected, this living mythical belief in the common confused equality of men, G.o.ds, plants, beasts, rivers, and what not, which still regulates savage society,(1) is one of the most prominent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked and exactly described it among the Egyptians--”common and akin to men and G.o.ds they believed the beasts to be.”(2) The belief in such equality is alien to modern civilisation. We have shown that it is common and fundamental in savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, we might quote Turner,(3) and for Melanesia, Codrington,(4) while for New Zealand we have Taylor.(5) For the Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern Asia, we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: ”Each tribe of these people look upon some particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan, goose, raven, etc., and such is not eaten by that tribe” though the others may eat it.(6) As the majority of our witnesses were quite unaware that the facts they described were common among races of whom many of them had never even heard, their evidence may surely be accepted as valid, especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in other obvious and palpable shapes. If we have not made out, by the evidence of inst.i.tutions, that a confused credulity concerning the equality and kins.h.i.+p of man and the objects in nature is actually a ruling belief among savages, and even higher races, from the Lena to the Amazon, from the Gold Coast to Queensland, we may despair of ever convincing an opponent. The survival of the same beliefs and inst.i.tutions among civilised races, Aryan and others, will later be demonstrated.(7) If we find that the mythology of civilised races here agrees with the actual practical belief of savages, and if we also find that civilised races retain survivals of the inst.i.tutions in which the belief is expressed by savages, then we may surely infer that the activity of beasts in the myths of Greece springs from the same sources as the similar activity of beasts in the myths of Iroquois or Kaffirs. That is to say, part of the irrational element in Greek myth will be shown to be derived (whether by inheritance or borrowing) from an ascertained condition of savage fancy.
(1) See some very curious and disgusting examples of this confusion in Liebrecht's Zur Volkskunde, pp. 395, 396 (Heilbronn, 1879).
(2) De Abst., ii. 26.
(3) Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 238, and Samoa by the same author.
Complete totemism is not a.s.serted here, and is denied for Melanesia.
(4) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., ”Religious Practices in Melanesia”.
(5) New Zealand, ”Animal Intermarriage with Men”.
(6) Description of Asia (1783), p. 383.
(7) Professor Robertson Smith, Kins.h.i.+p in Arabia, attempts to show that totemism existed in the Semitic races. The topic must be left to Orientalists.
CHAPTER IV. THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES--MAGIC--METAMORPHOSIS--METAPHYSIC--PSYCHOLOGY.
Claims of sorcerers--Savage scientific speculation--Theory of causation--Credulity, except as to new religious ideas--”Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”--Fundamental ideas of magic--Examples: incantations, ghosts, spirits--Evidence of rank and other inst.i.tutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical beliefs.
”I mean eftsoons to have a fling at magicians for their abominable lies and monstrous vanities.”--PLINY, ap. Phil. Holland.
”Quoy de ceux qui naturellement se changent en loups, en juments, et puis encores en hommes?”--MONTAIGNE, Apologie pour Raymond de Sebonde.
The second feature in the savage intellectual condition which we promised to investigate was the belief in magic and sorcery. The world and all the things in it being conceived of vaguely as sensible and rational, are supposed to obey the commands of certain members of each tribe, such as chiefs, jugglers, or conjurors. These conjurors, like Zeus or Indra, can affect the weather, work miracles, a.s.sume what shapes, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, they please, and can metamorphose other persons into similar shapes. It has already been shown that savage man has regarded all THINGS as PERSONS much on a level with himself. It has now to be shown WHAT KIND OF PERSON HE CONCEIVES HIMSELF TO BE. He does not look on men as civilised races regard them, that is, as beings with strict limitations. On the other hand, he thinks of certain members of his tribe as exempt from most of the limitations, and capable of working every miracle that tradition has ever attributed to prophets or G.o.ds. Nor are such miraculous powers, such practical omnipotence, supposed by savages to be at all rare among themselves.
Though highly valued, miraculous attainments are not believed to be unusual. This must be kept steadily in mind. When myth-making man regards the sky or sun or wind as a person, he does not mean merely a person with the limitations recognised by modern races. He means a person with the miraculous powers of the medicine-man. The sky, sun, wind or other elemental personage can converse with the dead, and can turn himself and his neighbours into animals, stones and trees.