NATURE 



31 



THURSDAY, JULY 14, 1910. 



TOTEMISM UNVEILED. 

 Totetnism and Exogamy : a Treatise on Certain Early 

 Forms of Superstition and Society. By Prof. J. G. 

 Frazer. In four vols. Vol. i., xix + 579; vol. ii., 

 ix + 640: vol. ii., ix + 583; vol. iv., v + 379; eight 

 maps. (London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., igio.) 

 Price 2?. los. net the four vols. 



PROF. FR.AZER is a great artist as well as a 

 great anthropologist. He works on a big scale ; 

 no one in any department of research, not even Dar- 

 win, has employed a wider induction of facts. No 

 one, again, has dealt more conscientiously with each 

 fact; however seemingly trivial, it is prepared with 

 minute pains and cautious tests for its destiny as a 

 slip to be placed under the anthropological microscope. 

 He combines, so to speak, the merits of Tintoretto 

 and Meissonier. What, then, we may ask, of the 

 philosophical result, of the theory which should 

 emerge from all this acreage of minute workmanship? 

 In "Totemism and Exogamy" (so far the most 

 voluminous of his anthropological treatises) he admits 

 . — the passage is an interesting one — that he has 

 "never hesitated either to frame theories which 

 seemed to fit the facts, or to throw them away when 

 thev ceased to do so ; rtiy aim in this and my other 

 writings has not been to blow bubble hypotheses 

 which glitter for a moment and are gone; it has been 

 bv a wide collection and an exact classification of 

 facts to lay a broad and solid foundation for the 

 inductive studv of primitive man." 



To the mind of the truly scientific inquirer, the 

 theory of a subject is a continuously modified machine, 

 the object of, which is at once to sort the elements 

 of a combination and to re-combine them, so that by 

 a turn of the handle the observer can reproduce the 

 original process in all or any of its parts. Such a 

 machine onlv arrives at perfection after a long evolu- 

 tion guided by the "method of trial." Prof. Frazer 

 in anthropoloe'v, as Darwin in biology, is content to 

 try new models, and to fit new parts, not with the 

 meticulousness of static curatorship, but with the 

 abandon of experimental genius. 



This method and its result are illustrated in a very 

 perfect way bv that portion of the book which is 

 concerned with totemism. This portion (if we may 

 express our own belief at the risk of offending Prof. 

 Frazer's characteristic modesty), is actually "The 

 Complete Histor>' of Totemism, its Practice and its 

 Theory, its Origin and its End." Commencing with 

 a reprint of the first (1887) edition of "Totemism," a 

 model of its kind, a brief and digested survey of the 

 then known facts (and in its working hypotheses 

 innocuous enough to serve as an introduction for the 

 complete treatise), he next reproduces his first tentative 

 theory in "The Origin of Totemism" (Fortnightly 

 Review, 1899), namely, that the essence of it is the 

 "external soul," as suggested in "The Golden 

 Bough" of 1890, only to discard it, in the light of 

 the remarkable discoveries made by Messrs. Spencer 

 and Gillen in Central Australia, for another form, a 

 system of magic, " designed to supply a community 

 NO. 2124, VOL. 84] 



with all the necessaries of life, and especially with 

 the chief necessary of all, with food," a notable pic- 

 ture of cooperation tinged with superstition. Next, 

 in the reprint, "The Beginnings of Religion and 

 Totemism Among the Australian Aborigines " {Fort- 

 nightly Review, 1905 ; articles expanded from 

 " Observations on Central Australian Totemism," in 

 the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. 

 xxviii., 1899), he reproduces his third hypothesis. 



As this, in the present writer's opinion, when com- 

 pleted by the discoveries of Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, 

 and fully expounded in vol. iv., is the final explanation 

 of the mystery of totemism, and as even its author 

 admits that "here at last we seem to find a complete 

 and adequate explanation of the origin of totemism," 

 it calls for detailed attention. In 1899, Messrs. 

 Spencer and Gillen described the .Arunta and Kaitish 

 method of determining the totem. 



"A person derives his totem neither from his father 

 nor from his mother, but from the place where his 

 mother first became aware that she was with child. 

 Scattered all over the country are what Messrs. 

 Spencer and Gillen call local totem centres, that is, 

 spots where the souls of the dead are supposed^ to 

 live awaiting reincarnation, each of these spots being 

 haunted bv the spirits of people of one totem only ; 

 and wherever a pregnant woman first feels the child 

 in her womb, she thinks that a spirit of the nearest 

 totem centre has entered into her, and accordingly 

 the child will be of that local centre, whatever it may 

 be. without any regard to the totem either of the 

 father or of the mother." 



This Prof. Frazer terms conceptional totemism. 



" The theory on which it is based denies implicitly, 

 and the natives themselves deny explicitly, that 

 children are the fruit of the commerce of the sexes." 



He gives probable reasons for this apparently 

 strange ignorance. 



Turning now to the summary and conclusion in 

 vol. iv. of the present workj we read : — 



"Obviously, however, this theory of conception does 

 not by itself' explain totemism. ... It stops short of 

 doing so, by a single step. What a woman imagines 

 to enter her bodv at conception is not an anirnal, a 

 plant, a stone, or what not ; it is only the spirit of 

 a human child which has an animal, a plant, a 

 stone, or what not for its totem. . . . For the essence 

 of totemism . . . consists in the identification of a 

 man with a thing, whether an animal, a plant, or 

 what not. . . . Absolutely primitive totemism _. . . 

 ought to consist in nothing more or less than in a 

 belief that women are impregnated without the help 

 of men by something which enters their womb at the 

 moment when they first feel it quickened." 



The "missing link" was found in the Banks' 

 Islands by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers. Here the natives 

 "identify themselves with certain animals or fruits 

 and believe that they themselves partake of the quali- 

 ties and character of these animals and fruits. . . . 

 The reason they give for holding this belief and 

 observing this conduct is that their mothers were 

 impregnated bv the entrance into their wombs of 

 spirit 'animals or spirit fruits, and that they them- 

 selves are nothing but the particular animal or 

 plant. . . ." 



The theory, as thus completed, "accounts for all the 

 facts (of totemism) in a simple and natural manner." 



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