PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 315 
without observing how extremely light was the foundation on 
which it rested. Accordingly, in the year 1897, I was startled 
and deeply interested by reading a passage in a letter of Pro- 
fessor Baldwin Spencer, which Mr. Lorimer Fison kindly for- 
warded to me. Professor Spencer wrote from Central Aus- 
tralia, describing some of the ceremonies which he was then 
witnessing among the Arunta tribe, and at the end of the letter, 
which is dated Alice Springs, 21st November, 1896, he added a 
postscript in which he noted it as remarkable that in several of 
the ceremonies he had witnessed the men ate their own totems (0). 
Here, then, I thought we seem to have the totem sacrament, 
and I communicated the information, together with my 
own provisional inference from it in a letter to Mr. 
Andrew Lang, who made a guarded allusion to it in a 
book published the same year (c). But I suspended judg- 
ment until Professor Spencer and his colleague, Mr. 
Gillen, should have published their materials in _ full. 
This they have now done in their great. work, “The 
Native Tribes of Central Australia,” which, in fact, supphes the 
long-sought evidence for the practice of a totem sacrament by 
tribes among whom totemism is a lving institution. Among 
these Central Australian tribes the totem sacrament forms part 
of those Intichiuma ceremonies which are practised for the pur- 
pose of multiplying the plants and animals that are used for 
food; and it is believed that the performance would fail 
of its purpose if the performers did not partake of the 
sacrament, or, in other words, if they did not eat their 
totem. Thus Robertson Smith’s wonderful intuition—almost 
prevision—has been strikingly confirmed after the lapse 
of years. Yet what we have found is not precisely what 
he expected. The sacrament he had in his mind was a 
religious rite; the sacrament we have found is a magical cere- 
mony. He thought that the slain animal was regarded as 
divine, and never killed except to furnish the mystic meal ;. as a 
matter of fact, the animals partaken of sacramentally by the 
Central Australians are in no sense treated as divine, and though 
they are not as a rule killed and eaten by the men and women 
whose totems they are, nevertheless they are habitually killed 
and eaten by all the other members of the community ; indeed, 
the evidence goes to show that at an earlier time they were 
commonly ,eaten also by the persons whose totems they were, 
nay, even that such persons partook of them more freely, and 
were supposed to have a better right to do so than any one else. 
The object of the real totem sacrament which Messrs. Spencer 
(4) ‘A rather curious thing is that in five of the ceremonies we have seen the per- 
formers are engaged in eating their own totem.’’ This is all that Prof. Spencer says on 
the subject in the letter, which is in my possession. 
(c) Modern Mythology (London, New York, and Bombay, 1897), p. 84. 
