Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 8

49); the father was thus not of the kin of his child by the alien woman.

Cieza was with Validillo in 1538.

(4) In Pinkerton, xvi. 400.

While in the case of the Ashantee tribes, we can only infer the existence of a belief in kinship with the animals from the presence of the other features of fully developed totemism (especially from the refusal to eat the name-giving animal), we have direct evidence for the opinion in another part of Africa, among the Bechuanas.(1) Casalis, who pa.s.sed twenty-three years as a missionary in South Africa, thus describes the inst.i.tution: "While the united communities usually bear the name of their chief or of the district which they inhabit" (local tribes, as in Australia), "each stock (tribu) derives its t.i.tle from an animal or a vegetable. All the Bechuanas are subdivided thus into Bakuenas (crocodile-men), Batlapis (men of the fish), Banarer (of the buffalo), Banukus (porcupines), Bamoraras (wild vines), and so forth.

The Bakuenas call the crocodile their father, sing about him in their feasts, swear by him, and mark the ears of their cattle with an incision which resembles the open jaws of the creature." This custom of marking the cattle with the crest, as it were, of the stock, takes among some races the shape of deforming themselves, so as the more to resemble the animal from which they claim descent. "The chief of the family which holds the chief rank in the stock is called 'The Great Man of the Crocodile'. Precisely in the same way the d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland is styled in Gaelic 'The Great Lady of the Cat,'" though totemism is probably not the origin of this t.i.tle.

(1) E. Casalis, Les Ba.s.soutos, 1859.

Casalis proceeds: "No one would dare to eat the flesh or wear the skin of the animal whose name he bears. If the animal be dangerous--the lion, for example--people only kill him after offering every apology and asking his pardon. Purification must follow such a sacrifice." Casalis was much struck with the resemblance between these practices and the similar customs of North American races. Livingstone's account(1) on the whole corroborates that of Casalis, though he says the Batau (tribe of the lion) no longer exists. "They use the word bina 'to dance,' in reference to the custom of thus naming themselves, so that when you wish to ascertain what tribe they belong to, you say, 'What do you dance?'

It would seem as if this had been part of the worship of old." The mythological and religious knowledge of the Bushmen is still imparted in dances; and when a man is ignorant of some myth he will say, "I do not dance that dance," meaning that he does not belong to the guild which preserves that particular "sacred chapter".(2)

(1) Missionary Travels (1857), p. 13.

(2) Orpen, Cape Monthly Magazine, 1872.

Casalis noticed the similarity between South African and Red Indian opinion about kinship with vegetables and beasts. The difficulty in treating the Red Indian belief is chiefly found in the abundance of the evidence. Perhaps the first person who ever used the word "totemism,"

or, as he spells it, "totamism," was (as we said) Mr. Long, an interpreter among the Chippeways, who published his Voyages in 1791.

Long was not wholly ignorant of the languages, as it was his business to speak them, and he was an adopted Indian. The ceremony of adoption was painful, beginning with a feast of dog's flesh, followed by a Turkish bath and a prolonged process of tattooing.(1) According to Long,(2) "The totam, they conceive, a.s.sumes the form of some beast or other, and therefore they never kill, hurt, or eat the animal whose form they think this totam bears". One man was filled with religious apprehensions, and gave himself up to the gloomy belief of Bunyan and Cowper, that he had committed the unpardonable sin, because he dreamed he had killed his totem, a bear.(3) This is only one example, like the refusal of the Osages to kill the beavers, with which they count cousins,(4) that the Red Man's belief is an actual creed, and does influence his conduct.

(1) Long, pp. 46-49.

(2) Ibid., p. 86.

(3) Ibid., p. 87.

(4) Schoolcraft, i. 319.

As in Australia, the belief in common kin with beasts is most clearly proved by the construction of Red Indian society. The "totemistic" stage of thought and manners prevails. Thus Charlevoix says,(1) "Plusieurs nations ont chacune trois familles ou tribus princ.i.p.ales, AUSSI ANCIENNES, A CE QU'IL PAROIT, QUE LEUR ORIGINE. Chaque tribu porte le nom d'un animal, et la nation entiere a aussi le sien, dont elle prend le nom, et dont la figure est sa marque, ou, se l'on veut, ses armoiries, on ne signe point autrement les traites qu'en traceant ces figures." Among the animal totems Charlevoix notices porcupine, bear, wolf and turtle. The armoiries, the totemistic heraldry of the peoples of Virginia, greatly interested a heraldic ancestor of Gibbon the historian,(2) who settled in the colony. According to Schoolcraft,(3) the totem or family badge, of a dead warrior is drawn in a reverse position on his grave-post. In the same way the leopards of England are drawn reversed on the shield of an English king opposite the mention of his death in old monkish chronicles. As a general rule,(4) persons bearing the same totem in America cannot intermarry. "The union must be between various totems." Moreover, as in the case of the Australians, "the descent of the chief is in the female line". We thus find among the Red Men precisely the same totemistic regulations as among the Aborigines of Australia. Like the Australians, the Red Men "never"

(perhaps we should read "hardly ever") eat their totems. Totemists, in short, spare the beasts that are their own kith and kin. To avoid multiplying details which all corroborate each other, it may suffice to refer to Schoolcraft for totemism among the Iowas(5) and the Pueblos;(6) for the Iroquois, to Lafitau, a missionary of the early part of the eighteenth century. Lafitau was perhaps the first writer who ever explained certain features in Greek and other ancient myths and practices as survivals from totemism. The Chimera, a composite creature, lion, goat and serpent, might represent, Lafitau thought, a league of three totem tribes, just as wolf, bear and turtle represented the Iroquois League.

(1) Histoire de la France-Nouvelle, iii. 266.

(2) Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam, by John Gibbon, Blue Mantle, London, 1682. "The dancers, were painted some party per pale, gul and sab, some party per fesse of the same colours;" whence Gibbon concluded "that heraldry was ingrafted naturally into the sense of the humane race".

(3) Vol. i. p. 356.

(4) Schoolcraft, v. 73.

(5) Ibid., iii. 268.

(6) Ibid., iv. 86.

The martyred Pere Rasles, again, writing in 1723,(1) says that one stock of the Outaonaks claims descent from a hare ("the great hare was a man of prodigious size"), while another stock derive their lineage from the carp, and a third descends from a bear; yet they do not scruple, after certain expiatory rites, to eat bear's flesh. Other North American examples are the Kutchin, who have always possessed the system of totems.(2)

(1) Kip's Jesuits in America i. 33.

(2) Dall's Alaska, pp. 196-198.

It is to be noticed, as a peculiarity of Red Indian totemism which we have not observed (though it may exist) in Africa, that certain stocks claim relations with the sun. Thus Pere Le Pet.i.t, writing from New Orleans in 1730, mentions the Sun, or great chief of the Natchez Indians.(1) The totem of the privileged cla.s.s among the Natchez was the sun, and in all myths the sun is regarded as a living being, who can have children, who may be beaten, who bleeds when cut, and is simply on the same footing as men and everything else in the world. Precisely similar evidence comes from South America. In this case our best authority is almost beyond suspicion. He knew the native languages well, being himself a half-caste. He was learned in the European learning of his time; and as a son of the Incas, he had access to all surviving Peruvian stores of knowledge, and could collect without difficulty the testimonies of his countrymen. It will be seen(2) that Don Garcila.s.so de la Vega could estimate evidence, and ridiculed the rough methods and fallacious guesses of Spanish inquirers. Garcila.s.so de la Vega was born about 1540, being the son of an Inca princess and of a Spanish conqueror. His book, Commentarias Reales,(3) was expressly intended to rectify the errors of such Spanish writers as Acosta. In his account of Peruvian religion, Garcila.s.so distinguishes between the beliefs of the tribes previous to the rise of the Inca empire and the sun-worship of the Incas. But it is plain, from Garcila.s.so's own account and from other evidence, that under the Incas the older faiths and fetichisms survived, in subordination to sun-worship, just as Pagan superst.i.tions survived in custom and folk-lore after the official recognition of Christianity.

Sun-worship, in Peru, and the belief in a Supreme Creator there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise with the lower beliefs, and to have been content to allow a certain amount of bowing down in the temples of the elder faiths. According, then, to Garcila.s.so's account of Peruvian totemism, "An Indian was not looked upon as honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river,(4) or lake, or even from the sea, OR FROM A WILD ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call c.u.n.tur (condor), or some other bird of prey ".(5) A certain amount of worship was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts and natural objects. Men offered up to their totems "what they usually saw them eat".(6) On the seacoasts "they worshipped sardines, skates, dog-fish, and, for want of larger G.o.ds, crabs.... There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a G.o.d," including "lizards, toads and frogs." Garcila.s.so (who says they ate the fish they worshipped) gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the beginning men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one human stock from another. "The one desired to have a G.o.d different from the other.... They only thought of making one different from another."

When the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed "splendour and beauty" as contrasted with "the ugliness and filth of the frogs and other vermin they looked upon as G.o.ds".(7) Garcila.s.so, of course, does not use the North American word totem (or ote or otem) for the family badge which represented the family ancestors. He calls these things, as a general rule, pacarissa. The sun was the pacarissa of the Incas, as it was of the chief of the Natchez. The pacarissa of other stocks was the lion, bear, frog, or what not. Garcila.s.so accounts for the belief accorded to the Incas, when they claimed actual descent from the sun, by observing(8) that "there were tribes among their subjects who professed similar fabulous descents, though they did not comprehend how to select ancestors so well as the Incas, but adored animals and other low and earthly objects". As to the fact of the Peruvian worship of beasts, if more evidence is wanted, it is given, among others, by Cieza de Leon,(9) who contrasts the adoration of the Roman G.o.ds with that offered in Peru to brutes. "In the important temple of Pacha-camac (the spiritual deity of Peru) they worshipped a she-fox or vixen and an emerald." The devil also "appeared to them and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce".

Other examples of totemism in South America may be studied in the tribes on the Amazon.(10) Mr. Wallace found the Pineapple stock, the Mosquitoes, Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, Herons, and other totem kindreds. A curious example of similar ideas is discovered among the Bonis of Guiana. These people were originally West Coast Africans imported as slaves, who have won their freedom with the sword. While they retain a rough belief in Gadou (G.o.d) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided into totem stocks with animal names. The red ape, turtle and cayman are among the chief totems.(11)

(1) Kip, ii. 288.

(2) Appendix B.

(3) See translation in Hakluyt Society's Collection.

(4) Like many Greek heroes. Odyssey, iii. 489. "Orsilochus, the child begotten of Alpheus."

(5) Comm. Real., i. 75.

(6) Ibid., 53.

(7) Ibid., 102.

(8) Ibid., 83.

(9) Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 183.

(10) Acuna, p. 103; Wallace, Travels on Amazon (1853), pp. 481-506.

(11) Crevaux, Voyages dans l'Amerique du Sud, p. 59.

After this hasty examination of the confused belief in kinship with animals and other natural objects which underlies inst.i.tutions in Australia, West and South Africa, North and South America, we may glance at similar notions among the non-Aryan races of India. In Dalton's Ethnology of Bengal,(1) he tells us that the Garo clans are divided into maharis or motherhoods. Children belong to the mahari of the mother, just as (in general) they derive their stock name and totem from the mother's side in Australia and among the North American Indians. No man may marry (as among the Red Indians and Australians) a woman belonging to his own stock, motherhood or mahari. So far the maharis of Bengal exactly correspond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis also take their names from plants and animals, and so forth? We know that the Killis, similar communities among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this.(2) "The Mundaris, like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal distinction the name of some animal, and the flesh of that animal is tabooed to them as food; for example, the eel, the tortoise." This is exactly the state of things in Ashanti. Dalton mentions also(3) a princely family in Nagpur which claims descent from "a great hooded snake". Among the Oraons he found(4) tribes which might not eat young mice (considered a dainty) or tortoises, and a stock which might not eat the oil of the tree which was their totem, nor even sit in its shade. "The family or tribal names"

(within which they may not marry) "are usually those of animals or plants, and when this is the case, the flesh of some part of the animal or the fruit of the tree is tabooed to the tribe called after it."

(1) Dalton, p. 63.

(2) Ibid., p. 189.

(3) Ibid., p. 166.