1 — Totemism

the round one, and of the second by 'the scraper', and of the third by 'the one that does not chew'. The tribes mentioned are known by these by-names.

When an animal of the species that is the tribe's totem dies, its people hold a ceremony over its burial and grieve for it as they grieve for one of themselves. In the Owl tribe in Samoa, if one of its men finds a dead owl, he sits down beside it and falls to lamenting and weeping, and beats his brow with stones until he draws blood; then he shrouds the owl and carries it to the burying ground as though it were one of the members of the tribe. They hold that whoever affronts the totem or does it injury is visited with calamities, and this belief of theirs differs with the difference of tribes or of lands. Some of them hold that if a man eats his totem the women of his tribe become barren; others hold that they are stricken with diseases or disasters or the like; and others imagine that one who eats his totem is requited with death, in that the totem takes up its abode in his body and does not cease to eat away at him until he dies.

They believe, on the other side, that the totem does not harm its own. Those whose totem is the serpent, for instance, do not fear its sting, and in their view the serpent does not sting them. So likewise the Scorpion tribes in Senegambia: they are confident that the venomous scorpion passes over the body of one of them and does him no harm. Judge by this the tribes of the Wolves and their like. Often they test in this way the kinship of one who claims descent from one of these tribes: if a man alleges that he is of the Serpent tribe, they loose the serpent upon him, and if it stings him they say he is a lying pretender. On this principle they cast out everyone who does not observe the totem's due and shun doing it injury.

Yet they are not content that the totem should merely hold back its harm from its people or its worshippers; they look for it to do them good and to defend them. The tribe of the Wolves holds that the wolves defend it on the field of battle, and most of the adherents of totemism imagine that the totem warns its people of a danger before it falls, by signs or tokens, after the manner of what is expressed as the omen (faʼl) or the bird-augury (ṭīrah).

Among the things by which they seek nearness to the totem, desiring its good pleasure and its protection, is that they make themselves like it: they imitate it in its shape and its outward appearance, and wear its skin or a portion of its skin, or take some part of it and hang it upon their necks or their arms after the fashion of amulets among other nations, so that no individual is without an amulet that marks his connection with his totem.

Among their customs indicating that they reckon themselves the offspring of the totem is the ceremony they carry out at birth, or marriage, or death, and the like of these conditions. The tribe of the Red Gazelle, for example, when a child is born to them, paint his back with red. If he is of the tribe of the Wolf, the midwives cry out at his delivery, «A little wolf has been born to us», and they sew into the child's shirt a piece of a wolf's eye or of its heart. When a man of the tribe of the Red Dog in Java marries, they anoint the bride and bridegroom with the ash of the bones of a red dog. Judge by this the rest of the tribes, according to the kinds of totem to which they trace themselves; and they hold ceremonies of this sort at death or at marriage.

As for the sex totem, what is meant by it is that the males of the tribe, or its females, have a totem of their own. Some tribes in Australia have for their males one totem and for their females another totem, both of them other than the totem of the tribe. So likewise the personal totem: a man may have a totem peculiar to himself, other than the totem of the tribe and other than the sex totem.

As for the tribal totem from the social side, what is meant by it is the compact of the people of the tribe among themselves with regard to their relation to the other tribes. The people of one totem are reckoned brothers and sisters, aiding one another in ease and in hardship by bonds stronger than those between the members of a single household today. A man marries a woman not of his tribe and of a totem not his own, and the children may be reared upon yet another totem; so that if war breaks out, the people of one totem make common cause against the people of the other totem, and the man is parted from his wife and the child from his father or his mother.

Among the conditions of totemism is that the men of one totem do not marry women of their own tribe, nor its women men of it; and this is what the scholars of social science (al-ʻumrān) express as out-marriage (Exogamy). The people of a totem hold that marrying within the tribe itself is injurious to health, to the point of eating away the bones, and they punish whoever ventures upon it with death or with grievous torment. For this reason they take women from the other tribes by raiding, or by mutual agreement, or the like; and the children for the most part inherit the totem of their mothers, so that descent is joined among them, as it were, through the mothers and not through the fathers, as is the practice with us.

The tribe may branch out into sub-tribes and clans (buṭūn wa-afkhādh) traced to fathers among the animals or the plants, between which there is a relation of derivation — like the branching of an animal into species and the families and varieties beneath them — or by some other relation between the totem of the tribe and the totems of the branches, as when the totem of the tribe is an animal and the totem of its branch a plant which that animal eats: a matter there is no way of setting out at length.

Totemism is at present spread abroad in the savage world. It is general among the tribes of Australia and widely spread in northern America and in Panama, where the common totem is «the parrot»; nor is South America free of traces of totemism, on the borders of Colombia and Venezuela, and in Guiana and Peru. Totemism has a large place in Africa, being current in Senegambia, among the Bakali tribes upon the equator, upon the Ashanti Gold Coast, and among the Damara and the Bechuana in southern Africa, and in many places of that dark continent. It has traces in Madagascar and in some of the Malay islands. In Asia it has a trace in central India among some of the non-Aryan tribes of Bengal, and in Siberia, and some quarters of China, and the islands of the ocean — and most of these tribes have been brought by the scholars under totemism by analogy, because they hold certain animals or plants sacred even though they do not name themselves after them.

٭ Summary ٭ Totemism, then, is summed up in what follows:

(1) That it is current at present among the nations most deeply rooted in savagery.

(2) That its substance is the tribe's taking an animal, or a plant, or some other of the sensible beings, as a father to itself, believing that it is descended in succession from it and naming itself by its name.

(3) That every tribe holds its totem sacred, or worships it.

(4) That every tribe believes its totem protects it and defends it, or at the least does not harm it, even though harm be its nature.

(5) That marriage is forbidden among the people of one totem, and the basis of procreation with them is marrying daughters of the people of the other totems (exogamy).

(6) That fatherhood is lost among them, and descent is referred back to the mother.

(7) That the family counts for nothing with them; rather kinship terminates in the totem, and the people of one totem are brothers and sisters whom a single blood gathers together.

٭ The origin of this doctrine ٭ The doctrine of totemism, regarded as an ordering of society, is recent. The first to state it was Dr. McLennan, the English investigator of society, who died in the year 1881; for he composed upon this subject his book Marriage among the Ancients (Primitive Marriage) and published it for the first time in the year 1865, and then wrote many books upon this subject and what branches from it, in which he set forth the principle of his doctrine and the rules upon which he built his view of totemism. Hardly had he published his view when the scholars of society set themselves to criticise it, foremost among them the philosopher Spencer and Sir John Lubbock, the celebrated scholar of society — and the first of these especially, for he poured himself out in criticism of this doctrine in his book «The Principles of Social Order» and his book «The Principles of Civilisation» and others, with which we have no concern. We look now at the matter only from the side that touches us, and we shut our eyes to the soundness or the unsoundness of this doctrine, and inquire into what Professor Robertson Smith intended by applying it to the Arabs before Islam.

﴾ Smith's view of the totemism of the Arabs ﴿ Smith holds that the Arabs in their most ancient times traced their descent to fathers among the animals or the plants, which they worshipped or held sacred and by whose names they called themselves, and that their case in marriage and mother-right and the rest was like the case of the savage tribes in Australia and America.