[hill-tout] TOTEMISM : ITS ORIGIN AND IMPORT 69 



evolved. Surrounded as he felt himself with beings and agencies 

 disposed rather to harm than to befriend him, and being unable by the 

 limitations of his initelligence, to discern the true relations between 

 causes and effects, he is led irresistibly to attribute all his blessings 

 to friendly powers and all his ills to hostile ones. He assumes imme- 

 diate causal relations where they do not exist, and not knowing or 

 understanding the true causes of things takes for them some object in 

 his immediate environment. 



" A Kaffir broke a piece off the anchor of a stranded vessel and soon 

 after died. Ever after the Kaffirs regarded the anchor as something 

 mysterious, divine, and did it honour by saluting it as they passed by, 

 with a view to propitiate its wrath." ^ 



The Yakuts, Wuttke informs us, first saw a camel during an out- 

 break of smallpox and in oonsequemce pronounced the ariimal to be a 

 hostile deity who had brought the disease among them.^ These are 

 typical cases of the way in which the savage reasons. To the Kaffirs 

 the anchor was clearly the cause of the man's death; and to the Yakuts 

 the camel the cause of the smallpox. There was no doubt in their 

 minds. Did not the facts speak for themselves ? Another savage con- 

 nects some object in his mind with certain good fortune that has 

 happened to him, and ^thereafter that objeot becomes his fetish, his 

 tutelary deity to be consulted or appealed to in all emergencies. An 

 American savage chose the crucifix and a little image of the virgin 

 as his manitus after he had found, as he believed, tliat they had pro- 

 tected him on sundry occasions against the arrows of his enemies." ^ 



It is then, in these beliefs common to savage man the world over 

 that we find the raison d'être of totemism, and under this term I include 

 the kindred phenomena of fetishism; for the explanation of the one 

 is the explanation of the other. Between the fetish so-called and the 

 totem, on its religious and magical side, that is, in its essential cliar- 

 acter, I can perceive no difference at all. They are equally the out- 

 come of the antJiropopathic apprehensions of the universe by savage 

 man. So also is the Taboo, the religious ban of the Polynesians. 

 Among American savages we find all three phases in various stages of 

 development. In the list of personal totems of the Thompson Indians 

 given by Teit in his Memoir on that tribe, and which I cited in my 

 former paper, we find exactly the same objects, and they have the same 

 characteristics as those which become the fetisli of the African savage. 

 AVaitz s definition of the fetich is equally a definition of the personal 



^ Quoted by Schultze in his " Fetishism " from Alberti's, die Kaffern. 



- Wuttke, Gesch. d. H. I. 72, cited by Schultze. 



^ Charlevoix Journal historique d'un voyage de l'Amérique Septentrionale, 

 Paris, 1774, p. 387. 



