Magic Science and Religion 45 



properties of beasts ; he desires to have them and, therefore, to 

 control them as useful and edible things ; sometimes he admires 

 and fears them. All these interests meet and, strengthening each 

 other, produce the same effect : the selection, in man's principal 

 preoccupations, of a limited number of species, animal first, 

 vegetable in the second place, while inanimate or man-made 

 things are unquestionably but a secondary formation, an intro- 

 duction by analogy, of objects w^hich have nothing to do u^ith the 

 substance of totemism. 



The nature of man's interest in the totemic species indicates 

 also clearly the type of belief and cult to be there expected. Since 

 it is the desire to control the species, dangerous, useful, or edible, 

 this desire must lead to a belief in special power over the species, 

 affinity with it, a common essence between man and beast or plant. 

 Such a belief implies, on the one hand, certain considerations and 

 restraints — the most obvious being a prohibition to kill and to eat ; 

 on the other hand, it endows man with the supernatural faculty 

 of contributing ritually to the abundance of the species, to its 

 increase and vitality. 



This ritual leads to acts of magical nature, by which plenty 

 is brought about. Magic, as we shall see presently, tends in all its 

 manifestations to become specialised, exclusive and departmental 

 and hereditary within a family or clan. In totemism the magical 

 multiplication of each species would naturally become the duty 

 and privilege of a specialist, assisted by his family. The families 

 in course of time become clans, each having its headman as the 

 chief magician of its totem. Totemism in its most elementary 

 forms, as found in Central Australia, is a system of magical co- 

 operation, a number of practical cults, each with its own social 

 basis but all having one common end : the supply of the tribe 

 with abundance. Thus totemism in its sociological aspect can 

 be explained by the principles of primitive magical sociology in 

 general. The existence of totemic clans and their correlation 

 with cult and belief is but an instance of departmental magic and 

 of the tendency to inheritance of magical ritual by one family. 

 This explanation, somewhat condensed as it is, attempts to show 

 that, in its social organisation, belief, and cult, totemism is not 

 a freakish outgrowth, not a fortuitous result of some special 

 accident or constellation, but the natural outcome of natural 

 conditions. 



