Folklore as an Historical Science
By George Laurence Gomme

[Pg208]

CHAPTER IV

ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

In dealing with the folklore of any country, it is important to note the general bearing of anthropological conditions. The earliest inhabitants, to whom part of the folklore belonged, and the later peoples, to whom part belonged, have both arrived at their ultimate point of settlement in the country where we discover their folklore after being in touch with many points of the world's surface. They are both world-people as well as national people—they belonged to anthropology before they came under the dominion of history. This important fact is often or nearly always neglected. We are apt to treat of Greek and Roman and Briton, of Cretan, Scandinavian, and Russian, as bounded by the few thousands of years of life which have fixed them with their territorial names, and to ignore all that lies behind this historic period. There is, as a matter of fact, an immense period behind it, reckoned according to geological time in millions of years, and this period, longer in duration, more strenuous in its influences upon character and mind, containing more representatives in peoples, societies, and races than the later period, has affected the later period to a far greater extent than is generally[Pg209] conceded or understood. We cannot understand the later period without knowing something of the earlier period.

There is more than this; for the dominating political races occupying European countries to-day were, in most cases, preceded by a non-political people. Thus, if we turn to Britain for illustration, we find evidence of a people physically allied with a race which cannot be identified with Celt or Teuton,[284] philologically allied with a people which spoke a non-Aryan language,[285] archæologically allied with the prehistoric stone-circle and monolith builders,[286] and we find custom, belief, and myth in Britain retaining traces of a culture which is not Celtic and not Teutonic, and which contains survivals of the primitive system of totemism.[287] These four independent classes of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history and folklore. The questions involved in[Pg210] totemism alone compel us to this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once possessed a full system of totemism. Totemism, at one stage or another of its development, is, in fact, one of the universal elements of man's life, and all consideration of its traces in civilised countries must begin with some conception of its origin. Its origin must refer back to conditions of human life which are also universal. Special circumstances, special peoples, special areas could not have produced totemism unless we proceed to the somewhat violent conclusion that beginning in one area it has spread therefrom to all areas. I know of no authority who advocates such a theory and no evidence in its favour. We are left therefore with the proposition that the origin of totemism must be sought for in some universal condition of human life at one of its very early stages, which would have produced a state of things from which would inevitably arise the beliefs, customs, and social organisations which are included under the term totemism.

There is therefore ample ground for a consideration of anthropological conditions as part of the necessary equipment of the study of folklore as an historical science. Unfortunately, authorities are now greatly divided on several important questions in anthropology, and it is not possible to speak with even a reasonable degree of certainty on many things. This compels further research than the mere statement of the present position, and I find myself obliged even for my present limited[Pg211] purpose to suggest many new points beyond the stage reached by present research. There is one advantage in this. It allows of a hypothesis by which to present the subject to the student, and a working hypothesis is always a great advantage where research is not founded entirely on actual observation by trained experts in the field. Where, therefore, I depart from the guidance of conclusions already arrived at by scholars in this department of research, it will be in order to substitute an opinion of my own which I think it is necessary to consider, and the whole study of the anthropological problems in their relation to folklore will assume the shape of a restatement of the entire case.

I am aware that a subject of this magnitude is too weighty and far-reaching to be properly considered in a chapter of a book not devoted to the single purpose, but it is necessary to attempt a rough statement of the evidence, though it will take us somewhat beyond the ordinary domain of folklore; but, while dealing with the anthropological position at sufficient length to make a complicated subject clear, if I can do so, I shall limit both my arguments and the evidence in support of them to the narrowest limits.

I

Mr. Wallace, I think, supplies the dominant note of the anthropological position when he suggests, though in a strangely unsatisfactory terminology, that it is the conscious use by man of his experience which causes his superior mental endowments, and his superior range of[Pg212] development.[288] We must lay stress upon the important qualification "conscious." It is conscious use of experience which is the great factor in man's progress. It is the greatest possession of man in his beginning, and has remained his greatest possession ever since. His experience did not always lead him to the best paths of progress, but it has led him to progress.

Even Mr. Wallace did not appreciate the full significance of this principle. The conscious adoption of a natural fact, of an observation from nature, or an assumed observation from nature, for social purposes, is an altogether different thing from the unconscious knowledge which man might have been possessed of, but which he never put to any use in his social development. Anthropologists must note not the natural facts known to later man or known to science, but the facts, or assumed facts, which early man consciously adopted for his purpose during the long period of his development from savage to civilised forms of life. The unconscious acts of mankind are of no use, or of very little use. It is only the conscious acts that will lead us along the lines of man's development. Man did not begin to build up his social system with the scientific fact of blood kinship through father and mother, but he evolved a theory of social relationship which served his purpose until the fact of blood kinship supplied a better basis. At almost the first point of origin in savage society we see man acting consciously, and it is amongst his conscious acts that we[Pg213] must place those traces of a sort of primitive legislation which have been found.[289]

Now this being the basis of anthropological observation, we have to apply it to the question of man's earliest progress. It is at its base an economic question. Primitive economics dominated the movements and condition of early man in a far more thorough manner than modern economics affect civilisation, and between the two systems lies the whole history of man. It reveals man adapting the social unit to the productive powers of its food supply, and developing towards the adaptation of the productive powers of food supply to the social unit. In the various stages that accompany this great change, there is no defined separation of peoples according to stages of culture, savage, barbaric, or civilised. There is nothing to suggest that all peoples do not come from one centre of human life. On the contrary, the evidence is strong that the primal stages in human evolution are traceable in all the culture stages, and, therefore, that they fit in with the general conclusions of anthropologists and naturalists as to man's origin in one definite centre, and his gradual spreading out from that centre.

I will take the chief conclusions arrived at in respect of this condition of birth at one centre and subsequent spreading out. Darwin has summarised the problem between the monogenists and polygenists in a manner which still ranks as a sufficient statement of the case, and his conclusion that "all the races of man are[Pg214] descended from a single primitive stock"[290] is accepted by the most prominent naturalists,[291] and confirmed by recent discoveries, which go to prove that this primitive stock began in miocene or pliocene times in the Indo-Malaysian intertropical lands.[292]

Anthropologists, who have been deeply interested in the controversy ranging round the origin of man, have in a remarkable manner neglected to take into full account the most significant phenomenon of spreading out.[293] They either neglect it altogether, or they relegate it to so small a place in their argument as to become a practical neglect. They treat of man as if he were always in a stationary condition, and exclude the important condition of movement as an element in his development. Mr. Spencer's general dictum that geological changes and meteorological changes, as well as the consequent changes of flora and fauna, must have been causing over all parts of the earth perpetual emigrations and immigrations,[294] does not help much, because it refers to special and cataclysmic events. Lord Avebury,[Pg215] though stating the true case, unfortunately contents himself at the end of his book on prehistoric man with a short summary of the evidence as to the equipment of primitive man in mental and social qualities when he began the great movement, and gives only a few lines to his conclusion that "there can be no doubt that he originally crept over the earth's surface little by little, year by year, just, for instance, as the weeds of Europe are now gradually but surely creeping over the surface of Australia."[295]

Mr. Keane is the first authority who thinks it appropriate to commence his treatise on man with an examination of the facts which show that "the world was peopled by migration from one centre by pleistocene man ... who moved about like other migrating faunas, unconsciously, everywhere following the lines of least resistance, advancing or receding, and acting generally on blind impulse rather than of set purpose;"[296] and it still remains with Dr. Latham to have formulated some fixed principles of the migratory movement in his admirable though, of course, wholly inadequate summary of man and his migrations. I will quote the passage in full: "So long as any continental extremities of the earth's surface remained unoccupied—the stream (or rather the enlarging circle of migration) not having yet reached them—the primary migration is going on; and when all have got their complement, the primary migration is over. During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in movement and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high function of subduing the earth, are in conflict[Pg216] with physical obstacles and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless, like Lot's wife, he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men—at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words, during the primary migration, the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate. But before many generations have passed away, all becomes full to overflowing, so that men must enlarge their boundaries at the expense of their fellows. The migrations that now take place are secondary. They differ from the primary in many respects. They are slower, because the resistance is that of humanity to humanity, and they are violent, because dispossession is the object. They are partial, abortive, followed by the fusion of different populations, or followed by their extermination as the case may be."[297] This passage, written so long ago as 1841, is still applicable to the facts of modern science, and there is only to add to it that the migration of man from a common centre, where life was easy, to all parts of the world, where life has been difficult, must have been undertaken in order to meet some great necessity, and must have become possible by reason of some great force which man alone possessed. The necessity was economic; the force was social development. If the movement has not been geographically ever forward, it has been ethnographically constant.[298] Movement always; sometimes the pressure has come from one direction, sometimes from[Pg217] another; sometimes it has caused compression and at other times expansion; sometimes it has sent humanity to inhabit regions that required generations of victims before it could hold its own. At all times the essential condition of life has been that of constant movement in face of antagonistic forces.[299] In whatever form the movement has come about, movement of a very definite character has taken place over an immense period of time, and sufficient to cover practically the whole earth with descendants from the original human stock. This conclusion is enormously strengthened by the accumulating evidence for the world-wide area covered by the remains of man's earliest weapon, the worked stone implement. It is everywhere. It is practically co-extensive with man's wanderings, and the greatness of the territory it covers marks it off as another of the universal relics of man's primitive life. Of no other[Pg218] weapon or instrument or associated object can this be said. The bow and arrow are unknown to the Australians and other peoples; pottery is unknown to the Bushmen and other peoples; the use of fire in cookery is not found among the South Sea Islanders, and is not claimed for other peoples.[300] We can get behind the development of these and other arts and come upon the ruder people who had not arrived at the stage they represent. But we cannot get behind the worked flint. It must have been the chief material cause of man's success in the migratory movement, and with the social development accompanying it must have made migration not only possible, but the only true method of meeting the earliest economic difficulties. It also provides us with the elements of a chronological basis. Behind palæolithic times there is an immensity of time when man struggled with his economic difficulties and spread out slowly and painfully. During palæolithic times the movement was more rapid and more general. Obstacles were overcome by palæolithic man becoming superior to his enemies by the use of weapons, and use of weapons caused, or at all events aided, the development of social institutions capable of bearing the new force of movement.

[Pg219] These two factors of economic necessity and social development are of equal importance in man's history, and they interlace at all points. They lead straight to the necessity for always taking count of the fact that man is primarily a migratory being, and that he has spread over the earth. Everywhere we find man. There is no habitable part of the world where he has not found a home. But we do not find him under equal conditions everywhere, and the different conditions afford evidence of the main lines of development. Roughly speaking, it may be put in this way. In the savage world the people appear as aborigines, that is to say, the first and only occupiers of the territory where they are located. In the barbaric world the condition of aboriginal settlement is tinged with the result of conquest, namely, the pushing out or absorption of the aboriginal folk in favour of a more powerful and conquering folk. In the political world, and in the political world only, there is not only the element of conquest, but the definite aim of conquest, which is to retain the aboriginal or conquered people as part of the political fabric necessary to the settlement of the conqueror, and at the same time to keep intact the superior position of the conqueror. In the savage world, society and religion are based upon locality; in the barbaric world there is the first sign of the element of kinship consciously used in the effort of conquest, which dies away gradually as successful settlement, by which conqueror and conquered become merged in one people, follows conquest; in the political world, and in the political world only, kinship is elevated into a necessary institution, is made sacred to the minds[Pg220] of tribesmen, and becomes an essential part of the religion of the tribe in order to keep the organisation of the tribal conquerors intact and free from the perils of dissolution when conquerors and conquered become members of one political unit. The savage and barbaric worlds are the homes of the backward peoples, the non-advanced or fossilised types of early humanity. The political world is the domain for the most part of the Aryan-speaking people, and of the Semitic people, and of those people who in Egypt within the Mediterranean area, and in China in the eastern Asian area, have built up civilisations which have only recently come under scientific observation.

These distinctions are not made by anthropologists as a rule, yet I cannot but think they are in the main the true distinctions which must be made if we are to arrive at any general conception of the progress of man from savagery to civilisation. The distinctions which seem to hold the field against those I have suggested, are those of hunter, pastoral, and agricultural. I say seem to hold the field, because they have never been scientifically worked out. They are stated in textbooks and research work almost as an axiom of anthropology, but their claim to this position is singularly weak and unsatisfactory, and has never been scientifically established. They are only economical distinctions, not social, and they do not properly express related stages. Hunting, cattle keeping, and agriculture are found in almost all stages of social evolution, and I, for one, deny that in the order they are generally given, they express anything approaching to accurate indication of the line of human[Pg221] progress. The distinctions I have suggested do not, of course, contain everything indicative of human progress. They are the first broad outlines to be filled up by the details of special peoples, special areas, and special ages. They involve many sub-stages which need to be properly worked out, and for which a satisfactory terminology is required. In the meantime, as measuring-posts of man's line of progress, they express the most important fact about man, namely, that his present enforced stationary condition has followed upon an enormous period of enforced movement. That movement has finally resulted in the presence of man everywhere on the earth's surface. This has been followed by the continued moving of savage man within the limited areas to which he has been finally pushed; by the movement of barbaric man from one place of settlement to another place of settlement, again within limited areas; and by the movement of political man through countries and continents of vast extent, and the final overlordship of political man over savage and barbaric man whom he has subjected and used for his purpose of final settlement in the civilised form of settlement. It will be apparent from the terms I have used to express the three chief stages in man's progress, that I give a special significance to the use of blood kinship as a social force, and in the sequel I think this special significance will be justified.[301]

No one can properly estimate the tremendous amount[Pg222] of movement which preceded these later limitations to movement. Savage and barbaric races are now hemmed in by the forces of modern civilisation. This was not the case even a few hundred years ago, and though we cannot say when constant movement all over the world was stayed, we can form some idea of the comparatively late period when this took place by a contemplation of the very recent growth of the political civilisations known to history. At the most, this can only be reckoned at some ten thousand years. At the back of this short stretch of time, or of the successive periods at which the new civilisations have arisen, there are recollections of great movements and great migrations. Egypt, Babylonia, India, Persia, Greece, and Rome have preserved these recollections by tradition, and tradition has been largely confirmed by archæology. Celts and Teutons have preserved parallel traditions which are confirmed by history observed from without. These traditions and memorials of the migration period have not been scientifically examined in each case, but where scholars have touched upon them, great and unexpected results have been produced.[302]

[Pg223] There was time enough, before these late and special movements which led to civilisation, for man, in the course of peopling the earth, to be brought at various stages to a standstill, and such a change in his life-history would have its own special results. One of the most momentous of these results is the fossilisation of social and mental conditions. Man stationary, or movable by custom within restricted areas, would live under conditions which must have produced forms of culture different from those under which man lived when he was always able to penetrate, not by custom but by the force of circumstances, into the unknown domain of unoccupied territory; and the fossilisation of his culture at various stages of development, in accord with the various periods of his being brought to a standstill, would be the most important result.[303] [Pg224] Whenever man was compelled to move onward the social forces which were demanded of him, as he proceeded from point to point, must have been quite different from those which he could have adopted if he had been allowed to stay in areas which suited him, if he could have selected his settlement grounds and awaited events. The calmness of the latter methods would perhaps have led to the unconscious development of social forms; the roughness of the actual method of constant movement led to the conscious adoption of social forms which has altered man's history. These considerations bring us to the conclusion that it is during the period of migratory movement that man has developed the social and religious elements with which the anthropologist finds him endowed, when at last in modern days he has been brought within the ken of scientific observation, and that therefore it is as a migratory not a stationary organism that the evolution of human society has to be studied, aided by the fact that enforced stationary conditions have produced in the savage world examples of perhaps the most remote as well as the more recent types of primitive humanity.

This last possibility, however, is not admitted by the best authorities. They endeavour to use biological methods in order to get behind existing savagery for the earliest period of human savagery. Darwin is not satisfied with the evidence as to promiscuity, strong as it appeared to him to be, and he pronounced it to be "extremely improbable" in a state of nature, and falls back upon the evidence of the rudimentary stages of human existence, there being, as among the gorillas, but one adult male in the band, and "when the young[Pg225] male grows up, a contest takes place for the mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community."[304] Mr. McLennan nowhere states the evidence for his first stage of human society—the primitive horde without any ideas of kinship, and based upon a fellowship of common interests and dangers[305]—but arrives at it by argument deduced from the conditions of later stages of development, and from the necessary suppositions as to the pre-existing stage which must have led to the later. Mr. Westermarck leads us straight to the evidence of the lower animals, from which he arrives at the small groups of humans headed by the male, and provides us with the theory of a human pairing season.[306] Mr. Morgan claims that no exemplification of mankind in his assumed lower status of savagery remained to the historical period,[307] presumably meaning the anthropo-historical period. And finally, Mr. Lang definitely claims that conjecture, and conjecture alone, remains as the means of getting back to the earliest human origins.[308]

There is great danger in relying too closely upon conjecture. We shall be repeating in anthropology what the analytical jurists accomplished in law and jurisprudence, and it will then soon become necessary to do for anthropology what Sir Henry Maine did for comparative jurisprudence, namely, demonstrate that the analytical method does not take us back to human[Pg226] origins, but to highly developed systems of society. Law, in the hands of the analytical jurists, is merely one part of the machinery of modern government. Social beginnings in the hands of conjectural anthropologists are merely abstractions with the whole history of man put on one side. Mr. Lang in leading the way towards the analytical method in anthropology has avoided many of its pitfalls, but his disciples are not so successful. Thus, when Mr. Thomas declares that "custom which has among them [primitive peoples] far more power than law among us, determines whether a man is of kin to his mother and her relatives alone, or to his father and father's relatives, or whether both sets of relatives are alike of kin to them,"[309] he is neglecting the whole significance and range of custom. His statement is true analytically, but it is not true anthropologically until we have ascertained what this custom to which he refers really is, whence it is derived, how it has obtained its force, what is its range of action, how it operates in differentiating among the various groups of mankind—in a word, what is the human history associated with this custom.

We must, however, at certain points in anthropological inquiry have recourse to the conjectural method. Its value lies in the fact that it states, and states clearly, the issue which is before us, and it is always possible to take up the conjectural position and endeavour to ascertain whether the neglected facts of human history which it expresses can be recovered. Its danger lies in the neglect of certain anthropological principles which can only be noted[Pg227] from definite examples, and the significance of which can only be discovered by the handling of definite examples. I will refer to one or two of the principles which I have in mind. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish between what is a practice and what is a rule. A practice precedes a rule. A practice incidental to one stage of society must not be confused with a rule, similar to the practice, obtaining in a different stage of society. Again, it must be borne in mind that identity of practice is no certain evidence of parallel stages of culture, and already it has been pointed out that identical practices do not always come from the same causes. Thirdly, it has to be borne in mind that primitive peoples specialise in certain directions to an extreme extent, and correspondingly cause neglect in other directions. The normal, therefore, has to give way to the special, and it is the degree of specialisation and the degree of neglect which are measuring factors of progress; in other words, it is the conscious adoption of certain rules of life with which we alone have to do.

These principles are apt to be wholly neglected, and, indeed, the last-mentioned element in the evolution of human society does not enter into the calculations of analytical anthropologists. They provide for the normal according to scientific ideas of what the normal is. They either neglect or openly reject what cannot be called abnormal, because it appears everywhere, but which they are inclined to treat as abnormal because it does not fit into their accepted lines of development. That which I have ventured to term specialisation and neglect is a great and important feature in[Pg228] anthropology. It obtains everywhere in more or less degree, and accounts for some of the apparently unaccountable facts in savage society, where we are frequently encountered by a comparatively high degree of culture associated with a cruel and debasing system of rites and practices which belong to the lowest savagery. Dr. Haddon has usefully suggested the term "differential evolution" for this phenomenon in the culture history of man,[310] and as I find myself in entire agreement with this distinguished anthropologist as to the facts[311] which call for a special terminology, I gladly adopt his valuable suggestion.

It is advisable to explain this phenomenon by reference to examples, and I will take the point of specialisation first. Even where industrial arts have advanced far beyond the primitive stage we are considering, we have the case of the Ahts, with whom "though living only a few miles apart, the tribes practise different arts and have apparently distinct tribal characteristics. One tribe is skilful in shaping canoes, another in painting boards for ornamental work, or making ornaments for the person, or instruments for hunting and fishing. Individuals as a rule keep to the arts for which their tribe has some repute, and do not care to acquire those arts in which other tribes excel. There seems to be among all the tribes in the island a sort of recognised tribal monopoly in certain articles produced, or that have been long[Pg229] manufactured in their own district. For instance, a tribe that does not grow potatoes, or make a particular kind of mat, will go a long way year after year to barter for those articles, which if they liked they themselves could easily produce or manufacture."[312] The remarkable case of the Todas specialising in cattle rearing and dairy farming is another example. Other people, both higher and lower in civilisation than the Todas, keep cattle and know the value of milk, but it is reserved for the Todas alone to have used this particular economic basis of their existence as the basis also of their social formation and their religious life.[313] The result is that they neglect other forms of social existence. They are not totemists, though perhaps they have the undeveloped germs of totemistic beliefs.[314] Their classificatory system of relationship makes their actual kinship scarcely recognisable; they "have very definite restrictions on the freedom of individuals to marry," and have a two-class endogamous division, but their marriage rite is merely the selection of nominal fathers for their children.[315] Throughout the careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of decadence.[316] I do not know that[Pg230] anywhere else could be found a stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation does not extend to a whole people, but rather to sections, as, for instance, among the Gold Coast tribes of Africa who "transmit the secret of their skill from father to son and keep the corporation to which they belong up to a due degree of closeness by avoiding intermarriage with any of the more unskilled labourers,"[317] and Dr. Bucher, who has worked out many of the earliest conditions of primitive economics, concludes that it may be safely claimed that every "tribe displays some favourite form of industrial activity in which its members surpass the other tribes."[318] This rule extends to the lowest type of man, as, for instance, among the Australians. Each tribe of the Narrinyeri, says Taplin, have been accustomed to make those articles which their tract of country enabled them to produce most easily; one tribe will make weapons, another mats, and a third nets, and then they barter them one with another.[319]

The evidence for industrial evolution is full of cases such as these, and they are extremely important to note, because it is not the mere existence of particular customs or particular beliefs among different peoples which is the factor to take into account, but the use or non-use, and the extent of the use or non-use, to which the particular customs or beliefs are put in each[Pg231] case.[320] Let me turn from the phenomenon of over-specialisation to that of neglect, and for this purpose I will take the simple fact of blood kinship. Existing obviously everywhere through the mother, and not obviously but admittedly through the father among most primitive peoples, there are examples where both maternal kinship and paternal kinship are neglected factors in the construction of the social group. The Nahals of Khandesh, for instance, neglect kinship altogether, and exist perfectly wild among the mountains, subsisting chiefly on roots, fruits, and berries, though the children during infancy accompany the mother in her unattached freedom from male control,[321] just as Herodotos describes the condition of the Auseans "before the Hellenes were settled near them."[322] Similarly, among many primitive peoples, kinship with the mother is recognised while kinship with the father is purposely neglected as a social factor. Thus, among the Khasia Hill people, the husband visits his wife occasionally in her own home, where "he seems merely entertained to continue the family to which his wife belongs."[323] This statement, so peculiarly appropriate to my purpose, is not merely an accident of language. With the people allied to the Khasis, namely, the Syntengs and the people of Maoshai, "the husband does not go and live in his mother-in-law's house; he only visits her there. In Jowai, the husband came to his mother-in-law's house only after dark," and the explanation of the latest[Pg232] authority is that among these people "the man is nobody ... if he be a husband he is looked upon merely as u shong kha, a begetter."[324]

The neglect of maternal and paternal kinship respectively in these two cases is obvious. They are recognised physically. But they are not used as part of the fabric of social institutions. Physical motherhood or fatherhood is nothing to these people, and one must learn to understand that there is wide difference between the mere physical fact of having a mother and father, and the political fact of using this kinship for social organisation. Savages who have not learnt the political significance have but the scantiest appreciation of the physical fact. The Australians, for instance, have no term to express the relationship between mother and child. This is because the physical fact is of no significance, and not as Mr. Thomas thinks because of the meagreness of the language.[325] Our field anthropologists do not quite understand the savage in this respect. It is of no use preparing a genealogical tree on the basis of civilised knowledge of genealogy if such a document is beyond the ken of the people to whom it relates. The information for it may be correctly collected, but if the whole structure is not within the compass of savage thought it is a misleading anthropological document. It is of no use translating a native term as "father," if father did not mean to the savage what it means to us. It might mean something so very different. With us, fatherhood connotes a definite individual with all sorts of social,[Pg233] economical, and political associations, but what does it mean to the savage? It may mean physical fatherhood and nothing more, and physical fatherhood may be a fact of the veriest insignificance. It may mean social fatherhood, where all men of a certain status are fathers to all children of the complementary status, and social fatherhood thus becomes much more than we can understand by the term father.

We cannot ignore the evidence which over-specialisation in one direction and neglect in other directions supply to anthropology. It shows us that human societies cannot always be measured in the scale of culture by the most apparent of the social elements contained in them. The cannibalism of the Fijians, the art products of the Maori, the totemism of the Australian blacks, do not express all that makes up the culture of these people, although it too often happens that they are made to do duty for the several estimates of culture progress. It follows that a survey of the different human societies might reveal examples of the possible lowest in the scale as well as various advances from the lowest; or in lieu of whole societies in the lowest scale, there might be revealed unexceptional examples of the possible lowest elements of culture within societies not wholly in the lowest scale. It will be seen how valuable an asset this must be in anthropological research. It justifies those who assert that existing savagery or existing survival will supply evidence of man at the very earliest stages of existence. It is the root idea of Dr. Tylor's method of research, and it is an essential feature in the science of folklore.

Evidence of this nature, however, needs to be[Pg234] exhaustively collected, and to be subjected to the most careful examination, as otherwise it may be used for the merest a priori argument of the most mischievous and inconclusive description. It involves consideration of whole human groups rather than of particular sections of each human group, of the whole corpus of social, religious, and economical elements residing in each human group rather than of the separated items. Each human group, having its specialised and dormant elements, must be treated as an organism and not as a bundle of separable items, each one of which the student may use or let alone as he desires. That which is anthropological evidence is the indivisible organism, and whenever, for convenience of treatment and considerations of space, particular elements only are used in evidence, they must be qualified, and the use to which they are provisionally put for scientific purposes must be checked, by the associated elements with which the particular elements are connected.

The human groups thus called upon to surrender their contributions to the history of man are of various formations, and consist of various kinds of social units. There is no one term which can properly be applied to all, and it will have been noted that I have carefully avoided giving the human groups hitherto dealt with any particular name, and only under protest have I admitted the terms used by the authorities I have quoted. I think the term "tribe" is not applicable to savage society, for it is used to denote peoples in all degrees of social evolution, and merely stands for the group which is known by a given name, or roams over a given district.[Pg235] But the use of this term is not so productive of harm as the use of the term "family," because of the universal application of this term to the smallest social unit of the civilised world, and because of the fundamental difference of structure of the units which roughly answer to the definition of family in various parts of the world. It is no use in scientific matters to use terms of inexact reference. As much as almost anything else it has led to false conclusions as to the evolution of the family, conclusions which seem to entangle even the best authorities in a mass of contradictions. I cannot think of a family group in savagery with father, mother, sons, and daughters, all delightfully known to each other, in terms which also belong to the civilised family, and still less can I think of these terms being used to take in the extended grouping of local kinships. One of our greatest difficulties, indeed, is the indiscriminate use of kinship terms by our descriptive authorities. We are never quite sure whether the physical relationships included in them convey anything whatever to the savage. If he knows of the physical fact, he does not use it politically, for blood kinship as a political force is late, not early, and the early tie was dependent upon quite other circumstances. Over and over again it will be found stated by established authorities that the family was the primal unit, the grouped families forming the larger clan, the grouped clans forming the larger tribe. This is Sir Henry Maine's famous formula, and it is the basis of his investigation into early law and custom.[326] It is founded[Pg236] upon the false conception of the family in early history, and upon a too narrow interpretation of the stages of evolution. When we are dealing with savage society, the terms family and tribe do not connote the same institution as when we are dealing with higher forms of civilisation. There is something roughly corresponding to these groupings in both systems, but they do not actually equate. When we pass to the Semitic and the Aryan-speaking peoples, both the family and tribe have assumed a definite place in the polity of the races which is not to be found outside these peoples.

So strongly has the family impressed itself upon the thought of the age that students of man in his earliest ages are found stating that "the family is the most ancient and the most sacred of human institutions."[327] This proposition, however, is not only denied by other authorities, as, for instance, Mr. Jevons, who affirms that "the family is a comparatively late institution in the history of society,"[328] but it rests upon the merely analytical basis of research, separated entirely from those facts of man's history which are discoverable by the means just now suggested. One is, of course, quite prepared to find the family among civilisations older than the Indo-European, and yet to find that it is a comparatively late institution among Indo-European peoples. As a matter of fact, this is the case; for the two kinds of family, the family as seen in savage society[Pg237] and the family as it appears among the antiquities of the Indo-European people, are totally distinct in origin, in compass, and in force; while welded between the two kinds of family is the whole institution of the tribe. It is no use introducing the theory adopted by Grote, Niebuhr, Mommsen, Thirlwall, Maine, and other authorities who have studied the legal antiquities of classical times, that the tribe is the aggregate of original family units. Later on I shall show that this cannot be the case. The larger kinship of the tribe is a primary unit of ancient society, which thrusts itself between the savage family and the civilised family, showing that the two types are separated by a long period of history during which the family did not exist.

It has taken me some time to explain these points in anthropological science, which appear to me not to have received proper consideration at the hands of the masters of the science, but which are essential factors in the history of man and are necessary to a due consideration of the position occupied by folklore. The chief results obtained are:—

It is with these results we have to work. They will help us to see how far the facts of anthropology, which begin far behind the historical world, have to do with the problems presented by folklore as a science having to deal with the historical world.

II

We may now inquire where anthropology and folklore meet. It is significant in this connection that in order to reach back to the earliest ages of man, our first appeal seems to be to folklore. The appeal at present does not lead us far perhaps, but it certainly acts as a finger post in the inquiry, for Dr. Kollmann, rejecting the evidence of the Java Pithecanthropus erectus as the earliest palæontological evidence of man, advances the opinion that the direct antecedents of man should not be sought among the species of anthropoid apes of great height and with flat skulls, but much further back in the zoological scale, in the small monkeys with pointed skulls; from which, he believes, were developed the human pygmy races of prehistoric ages with pointed skulls, and from these pygmy races finally developed the human race of historic times. And he relies upon folklore for one part of his evidence, for it is this descent of man, he thinks, which explains the persistency with which mythology and folklore allude to the subject of pygmy people, as well as the relative frequency with[Pg239] which recently the fossils of small human beings belonging to prehistoric times have been discovered.[329] It must not be forgotten, too, that this remote period is found in another class of tradition, namely, that to which Dr. Tylor refers as containing the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary period.[330]

It must be confessed that we do not get far with this evidence alone. If it proves that the true starting point is to be found in folklore, it also proves that folklore alone is not capable of working through the problem. Anthropology must aid here, and I will suggest the lines on which it appears to me it does this.

Our first effort must be made by the evidence suggested by the conjectural method. This leads us to small human groups, each headed by a male who drives out all other males and himself remains with his females and his children. Sexual selection thus acts with primitive economics[331] in keeping the earliest groups small in numbers, and creating a spreading out from these groups of the males cast out. We have male supremacy in its crudest form accompanied by an enforced male celibacy, so far as the group in which the males are born is concerned, on the part of those who survive the struggle for supremacy and wander forth on their own account. Marking the stages from point to point, in order to arrive at a systematic method of stating the complex problem presented by the subject we are[Pg240] investigating, we can project from this earliest condition of man's life two important elements of social evolution, namely—

The first of these elements strongly emphasises the migratory character of the earliest human groups. The second shows how each group is relieved of the incubus of too great a number for the economic conditions by the double process of sending forth its young males, and of its younger females being captured by successful marauders.

Let us take a fuller note of what the conditions of such a life might be. There is no tie of kinship operating as a social force within the groups; there is the unquestioned condition of hostility surrounding each group, and there is the enforced practice of providing mates by capture. Of these three conditions the most significant is undoubtedly the absence of the kinship tie. If then we use this as the basis for grouping the earliest examples of social organisation, we proceed to inquire whether there are any examples of kinless society in anthropological evidence.

Following up the clue supplied by folklore, we may see whether the pygmy people of anthropological observation answer in any way to those conjectural[Pg241] conditions.[332] I think they do. Thus, we find that the pygmy people are in all cases on the extreme confines of the world's occupation ground; that they occupy the territory to which they have been pushed, not that which they have chosen. As the most primitive representatives, they are the last outposts of the migratory movements. Dr. Beke has preserved an account of the pygmies which even in its terminology assists in their identification as a type of the remotest stages of social existence. Dr. Beke obtained certain information about the countries south-west of Abyssinia, from which Latham quotes the following:—

[Pg242] This evidence is confirmed in many directions. It coincides with the account by Herodotos of the expedition from Libya which met with a pygmy race,[334] and with a seventeenth-century account of a Dutch expedition to the north from the south, who "found a tribe of people very low in stature and very lean, entirely savage, without huts, cattle, or anything in the world except their lands and wild game."[335] Captain Burrows' account of the Congoland pygmies agrees in all essentials, and he particularly notes that they "have no ties of family affection such as those of mother to son or sister to brother, and seem to be wanting in all social qualities;" they have no religion and no fetich rites; no burial ceremony and no mourning for the dead; in short, he adds, "they are to my thinking the closest link with the original Darwinian anthropoid ape extant."[336] The evidence of the African pygmy people everywhere confirms these views, and differences of detail do not alter the general results.[337]

Following this up we get the greatest assistance from Asia.[338] The Semang people of the Malay Peninsula are a short race, the male being four feet nine inches in height, with woolly and tufted hair, thick lips and flat nose, and their language is connected with the [Pg243]group of which the Khasi people is a member.[339] They subsist upon the birds and beasts of the forest, and roots, eating elephants, rhinoceros, monkeys, and rats. They are said to have chiefs among them, but all property is common. Their huts or temporary dwellings, for they have no fixed habitations but rove about like the beasts of the forest, consist of two posts stuck in the ground with a small cross-piece and a few leaves or branches of trees laid over to secure them from the weather, and their clothing consists chiefly of the inner bark of trees.[340] They use stone or slate implements. The authority for this information does not directly state their social formation, but in a footnote he compares them to the Negritos of the Philippine Islands, "who are divided into very small societies very little connected with each other." This is confirmed by Mr. Hugh Clifford, who relates a story told to him in the camp of the Semangs, which tells how these people were driven to their present resting-place, "not for love of these poor hunting grounds," but because they were thrust there by the Malays who stole their women. One further point is interesting; they have a legend of a people in their old home, composed of women only. "These women know not men, but but when the moon is at the full, they dance naked in the grassy places near the salt-licks; the evening wind is their only spouse, and through him they conceive and bear children."[341] All this has been confirmed and[Pg244] more than confirmed by the important researches of Messrs. Skeat and Blagden in their recently published work on these people. There is no necessity to do more than refer to the principal features brought out by these authorities. In the valuable notes on environment, we have the actual facts of the migratory movement drawn clearly for us;[342] their nomadic habits, rude nature-derived clothing, forest habitations and natural sources of food are described;[343] the evolution of their habitations from the natural shelters, rock shelters, caves, tree buttresses, branches, etc., is to be traced;[344] they belong to the old Stone Age, if not to a previous Wood and Bone Age;[345] they have no organised body of chiefs, and there is no formal recognition of kinship; marital relationship is preceded by great ante-nuptial freedom;[346] the name of every child is taken "from some tree which stands near the prospective birthplace of the child; as soon as the child is born, this name is shouted aloud by the sage femme, who then hands over the child to another woman, and buries the after-birth underneath the birth-tree or name-tree of the child; as soon as this has been done, the father cuts a series of notches in the tree, starting from the ground and terminating at the height of the breast;"[347] the child [Pg245]must not in later life injure any tree which belongs to the species of his birth-tree, and must not eat of its fruit. There is a theory to accompany this practice, for birds are believed to be vehicles for the introduction of the soul into the newborn child, and all human souls grow upon a soul-tree in the other world, whence they are fetched by a bird which is killed and eaten by the expectant mother;[348] but there seems to be no evidence of any religious cult or rite, and what there is of mythology or legend is probably borrowed.[349] The details in this case are of special importance, as they form a complete set of associated culture elements, and I shall have to return to them later on.

I shall not attempt to exhaust the evidence to be derived from the pygmy people. What has been said of the examples I have chosen may in all essentials be said of the remaining examples. But it is perhaps advisable to be assured that the evidence of kinless people is not confined to the stunted and dwarfed races, for it has been argued that the pygmies are nothing but the ne'er-do-wells of the stronger races, and may not therefore be taken as true racial types. This may be true, but it does not affect my case, because I am not depending so much upon the physical characteristics of these people as upon their culture characteristics. These are definite and conclusive, and they are repeated among people of higher physical type. Thus the Jolas of the Gambia district have practically no government and no law; every man does as he chooses, and the most successful thief is considered the greatest man. There is no recognised[Pg246] punishment for murder or any other crime. Individual settlement is the only remedy, and the fittest survives. There is no formality in regard to marriage, or what passes for marriage, amongst them. Natural selection is observed on both sides, and the pair, after having ascertained a reciprocity of sentiment, at once cohabit. They do not intermarry with any other race.[350]

It is possible to proceed from this to other regions of man's occupation ground. In America, the evidence of the modern savage is preceded by most interesting facts. If we compare Dr. Brinton's conclusions as to the spread of the American Indians from the north to the south, and as to the development of culture in the favoured districts being of the same origin as the undeveloped culture of the less favoured and of absolutely sterile districts, with Mr. Curtin's altogether independent conclusions as to the growth of the American creation myth with its cycle of first people peaceful and migratory, and its cycle of second people "containing accounts of conflicts which are ever recurrent," we are conscious that mythic and material remains of great movements of people are in absolute accord,[351] an accord which leads us to expect that the peoples who were pushed ever forward into the most desolate and most sterile districts of southern America would be the most nearly savage of all the American peoples. This is in agreement with[Pg247] Darwin's estimate of the Fuegians who wander about in groups of kinless society,[352] and it is in accord with other evidence. Thus the Zaparos, belonging to the great division of unchristianised Indians of the oriental province of Ecuador, have the fame of being most expert woodsmen and hunters. To communicate with one another in the wood, they generally imitate the whistle of the toman or partridge. They believe that they partake of the nature of the animals they devour. They are very disunited, and wander about in separate hordes. The stealing of women is much carried on even amongst themselves. A man runs away with his neighbour's wife or one of them, and secretes himself in some out of the way spot until he gathers information that she is replaced, when he can again make his appearance, finding the whole difficulty smoothed over. In their matrimonial relations they are very loose—monogamy, polygamy, communism, and promiscuity all apparently existing amongst them. They allow the women great liberty and frequently change their mates or simply discard them when they are perhaps taken up by another. They believe in a devil or evil spirit which haunts the woods, and call him Zamáro.[353]

In all these cases, and I do not, of course, exhaust the evidence, there is enough to suggest that the social forms presented are of the most rudimentary kind. Conjecture has not and, I think, cannot get further back than such evidence as this. The social grouping is supported by outside influences rather than internal[Pg248] organisation; neither blood kinship nor marital kinship is recognised; hostility to all other groups and from other groups is the basis of inter-groupal life. To these significant characteristics has to be added the special birth custom and belief of the Semang pygmies. It is clear that the soul-bird belief and the tree-naming custom are different phases of one conception of social life, a conception definitely excluding recognition of blood kinship, and derived from the conscious adoption of an experience which has not reached the stage of blood kinship, but which includes a close association with natural objects. All this makes it advisable to take fuller count of pygmy culture than has hitherto been given to it. The pygmies have in truth always been a problem in man's history. From the time of Homer, Herodotos, and Aristotle, the pygmies have had their place among the observable types of man, or among the traditions to which observers have given credence. In modern times they have been accounted for either as peoples degraded from a higher level of culture, or as peoples who have never advanced. But whether we look upon these people as the last remnants of the primitive condition of hostility or whether they are reversions to that condition by reason of like causes, they bring before us what conjectural research has prepared us for. The first supposition is neither impossible nor incredible. The slow spreading-out in hostile regions would allow of the preservation of some examples of preference for unrestrained licence at the expense of constant hostility, in place of a modified peacefulness at the expense of restricted freedom in matters so dear to the human animal as sexual choice[Pg249] and power. The second supposition contains an element of human history which must find a place in anthropological research. The possible phases of social formation are very limited. If any section of mankind cannot develop in one direction, they will stagnate at the stage they have reached, or they will retrograde to one of the stages from which in times past they have proceeded. There is no other course, and the very limitations of primitive life prevent us from considering the possibility of any other course. Either of these alternatives allows us to consider the examples of hostile inter-grouping as sufficient to supply us with the vantage ground for observation of man in his earliest stages of existence. Perhaps each of them may contain somewhat of the truth. But whatever may be considered as the true cause of the pygmy level of culture, there is an underlying factor which must count most strongly in its determination, namely, that these people are the people who in the process of migration have been pushed out to the last strongholds of man. Whether they could not or would not conform to the newer condition of stationary or comparatively stationary society is not much to the point in presence of the fact that nowhere have they conformed to this standard of existence. Moreover we are entitled to the argument, which has been the main point advanced in connection with the anthropological problems we are discussing, that the most primitive type of man must of necessity be sought for, and can only be found at the extremes of the migration movement wherever that is discernible.[354]

The question now becomes, can we by means of[Pg250] recognisable links proceed from the rudimentary kinless stage of society to the earliest stage of kinship society? This is a most difficult problem, but it must be solved. If the rudimentary kinless groups do indeed constitute a factor in human evolution, they are a most important factor. If they do not constitute such a factor, they can only be accidental productions, the sport of exceptional circumstances not in the line of evolution, and as such they are not of much use in anthropology. It will be seen, therefore, that the connection between rudimentary kinless society and the earliest, or representatives of the earliest, kinship society, is an essential part of an inquiry into origins.

It may be approached first from the conjectural basis. On this basis it may be asserted that the victorious male of the primary groups would remain victorious only just so long as he could continue to adjust the conditions on the primary basis, and preserve his females to himself. New conditions would arise whenever the limitation of the food lands produced a degree of localisation of the hitherto movable groups. There would then have crept into human experience the necessity for something of common action among a wider range than the simple group. This is a new force, and social evolution is henceforth going to operate in addition to, perhaps to a limited extent in substitution of, the constant movement towards new food lands. The single male would no longer be the victorious male by himself; and sharing his power with other males meant the reduction of his power in his own group. Called away for something more than the defence of his own primary group of females, he[Pg251] would leave the females with the practical governance of the primary groups. This tendency would develop. Wherever the constant movement outwards became stayed by geographical or other influences, the groups which experienced the shock of stoppage would undergo change. The female in the various primary groups would become a static element, and the male alone would follow out in the more restricted area the older force of movement which he had learned during the period of unrestricted scope.[355] He would have to find his mates during his roamings, instead of the former condition of fighting for them during the group movements; and his relationship to the primary groups would be therefore fundamentally changed. From being the central dominant head, he would become a constantly shifting unit. The female under these conditions would become the centre of the new social unit, and the male would become the hunter for food and the fighter against enemies. The new social forces would thus consist of local units commanded by the female, and revolving units composed of the males, and there would arise therefrom cleavage between the economic conditions of the two sexes.

That primitive economics bear the impress of sex cleavage is borne out by every class of evidence, and it is in this circumstance that we first come upon societies distinguished by containing two of the most important social elements, exogamy and totemism.[Pg252] Before, however, examining examples of societies containing the two elements of exogamy and totemism, it will be necessary to say something by way of preliminaries on these two elements themselves. They have rightly been made the subject of important special inquiry by anthropological scholars, as being in fact the key to the question of social evolution, and we shall clear the ground considerably by first of all turning to the principal authorities on the subject, and ascertaining the present position of the inquiry.

I must however note, in the first place, that as I have stated the case, exogamy and totemism appear as two separate and distinct elements, whereas it is usual to consider exogamy as an essential part of totemism. I cannot, however, see that this is so. In advanced totemism, it is true, they are found as inseparable parts of one system, but they may well have started separately and coalesced later. In point of fact, all the evidence points in this direction, and if we cease to consider exogamy as a necessary element of totemism, we can advance investigation more rapidly and with greater accuracy.

We come very quickly upon what may be termed natural exogamy. Male working with male outside the groups formed by women and the younger offspring would produce a natural exogamy, which would have followed upon the exogamy produced by hostile capture of women, and two streams of influence would thus tell in favour of the evolution of a system of formal exogamy, and Dr. Westermarck's theory of a natural avoidance of housemates, with all its wealth of evidence, helps us at this point.

[Pg253] The position is not so clear as to totemism. If we begin, however, with a clear understanding that it is not a part of the machinery of exogamous grouping, but an independent growth of its own, we shall have gained an important point, for the contrary opinion has very often obscured the issue and prevented research in the right direction.

It will be advisable to have before us the principal theories as to the origin of totemism. There are practically three—Mr. Frazer's, Mr. Lang's, and Mr. Baldwin Spencer's. Mr. Frazer considers totemism to be "in its essence nothing more or less than an early theory of conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species." Mr. Frazer explains this theory further by saying that "naturally enough, when she is first aware of the mysterious movement within her, the mother fancies that something has that very moment passed into her body, and it is equally natural that in her attempt to ascertain what the thing is, she should fix upon some object that happened to be near her, or to engage her attention at the critical moment."[356]

Mr. Lang rejects Mr. Frazer's theory in toto, and propounds his own as due to the naming of savage societies, and to a sort of natural exogamy produced by practically the same set of conditions as I have already described. Mr. Lang's totemism began in the primary groups, and began with exogamy as a necessary part of it. "Unessential to my system," says Mr. Lang, "is the question how the groups got animal names, as[Pg254] long as they got them, and did not remember how they got them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking indicated an essential and mystic rapport between each group and its name-giving animal. No more than these three things—a group animal name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connection between all bearers human and bestial of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions (the mystically sacred quality of the blood as life)—was needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy," and further, "we guess that for the sake of distinction, groups gave each other animal and plant names. These became stereotyped we conjecture, and their origin was forgotten. The belief that there must necessarily be some connection between animals and men of the same names led to speculation about the nature of the connection. The usual reply to the question was that the men and animals of the same name were akin by blood. The kinship with animals being particularly mysterious was peculiarly sacred. From these ideas arose tabus, and among others that of totemic exogamy."[357]

Mr. Baldwin Spencer, and with him Dr. Haddon, consider totemism to have arisen from economic conditions. Primitive human groups, says Dr. Haddon, "could never have been large, and the individuals comprising each group must have been closely related. In favourable areas each group would have a tendency to occupy a restricted range, owing to the disagreeable results which arose from encroaching on the territory over which another group wandered. Thus, it would[Pg255] inevitably come about that a certain animal or plant, or group of animals or plants, would be more abundant in the territory of one group than in that of another."[358]

These theories are not necessarily mutually destructive, though they seem to me even collectively not to contain the full case for totemism. Mr. Frazer does not account for woman's isolation at the time of conceptual quickening, for the closeness of her observation of local phenomena, and for the separateness of her ideas from the actual facts of procreation. Mr. Lang overloads his case. He is accounting not for the origin of totemism, but for the origin of all, or almost all, that totemism contains in its most developed forms—"all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy" as he says. He postulates a name-giving process by drawing upon the conceptions as to names by advanced savage thought, and he does not account for the fact that according to his theory, animals and plants must not only have been named, but named upon some sort of system known to a wide area of peoples, before totemistic names for the groups could have been given to them. Mr. Spencer's and Dr. Haddon's theory is perhaps open to the doubts caused by Mr. Lang's criticism of it that there is only one case of a known economic cause for totemism—an Australian case where two totem kins are said to have been so called "from having in former times principally subsisted on a small fish and a very small opossum;"[359] but on the other hand it does supply a vera causa, the actual evidence for which may well have passed away[Pg256] with the development of totemism, without leaving survivals.

All these theories, however, are the result of considerable research and experience, and it is more than probable that they may each contain fragments of the truth which need the touch of combination to show how they stand in relation to the problem which they are propounded to solve. There are features of totemism which are not noticed by any of these distinguished authorities. By using the hitherto unnoticed features, I think it possible to produce a theory as to the origin of totemism, which will contain the essential features of those theories now prominently before the world.

I will set down the order in which the problem can be approached from the standpoint already reached, and we may afterwards try to ascertain what proof is to be derived from totemic societies of the rudest type.

Now totemism is essentially a system of social grouping, whose chief characteristic is that it is kinless—that is to say, the tie of totemism is not the tie of blood kinship, but the artificially created association with natural objects or animals. It takes no count of fatherhood, and only reckons with the physical fact of motherhood. It is not the actual fatherhood or the actual motherhood which is the fundamental basis of totemism, but the association with animal, plant, or other natural object. This is evidently the fact, whatever view is taken of totemism, and that totemism is, in its origin and principle, a kinless, not a kinship system, is the first fact of importance to bear in mind throughout all inquiry. Thus Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say "the identity of the human individual is often sunk[Pg257] in that of the animal or plant from which he is supposed to have originated."[360]

The next fact of importance is that as it commences at birth time, it must be closely associated with the mother and her actions as mother. This leads us to the observation that it is through the agency of the mother that the totem name is conferred upon their children, and to the necessary antecedent fact that women must have themselves possessed the name they conferred—possessed, that is, either the name as a personal attribute and valued as such, or else the power of evolving the name and the capacity of using it with totemic significance. I conclude from this, therefore, that the search for the origin of totemism must be made from the women's side of the social group. Such a search would lead straight to the industrialism of early woman, from which originated the domestication of animals, the cultivation of fruits and cereals, and the appropriation of such trees and shrubs as were necessary to primitive economics.[361] The close and intimate relationship with human life which such animals, plants, and trees would assume under the social conditions which have been postulated as belonging to this earliest stage of evolution, and the aid which these friendly and always present companions would render at all times and under most circumstances, would generate and develop many of those savage conceptions which have become known to research. As human friends they would become part of humanity, just as Livingstone[Pg258] notes of an African people that they did not eat the beef which he offered to them because "they looked upon cattle as human and living at home like men,"[362] an idea which is also the basis of the custom in India not to taste fruit of a newly planted mangrove tree until it is formally "married" to some other tree.[363] These are but the fortunate instances where definite record in set terms has been made. At the back of them lies a whole collection of anthropomorphic conceptions, indulged in by man at all stages of his career.[364] [Pg259] As superhuman agencies for pregnancy and birth, they would do what the human father in the society we are contemplating could not be expected to do, for he would be seldom present during the long period of pregnancy; he would have shared with other males the privileges of sexual intercourse, and he would therefore not be so closely in companionship with the women of the local groups as the friendly animal, plant, or tree who did so much for the mothers. There would thus be formed the groundwork for the fashioning of that most incredible of all beliefs, well founded, as Mr. Hartland has proved both from tradition and belief,[365] that the human father was not father, and that other agencies were responsible for the birth of children.

Gathering up the several threads of this argument, it seems to me that there is within this sphere of primitive thought and within these conditions of primitive life, ample room for the growth of all the main conceptions belonging to totemism; and it will be seen how necessary it is to separate totemism at its beginning from totemism in its most advanced stages. Totemism has not come to man fully equipped in all its parts. It is like every other human institution, the result of a long process of development, and the various stages of development are important parts of the evidence as to origins. At the beginning, it was clearly not connected with blood kinship and descent; it was as clearly not connected with any class system of marriage. But its beginnings would allow of these later growths, would perhaps almost engender these later growths.

[Pg260] Thus, the primary notion of the totem birth of children would, when blood kinship and descent became a consciously accepted element in social development, easily slide into the belief of a totemic ancestor and kinship with the totem; the protection and assistance afforded by the totem to the women of the primary groups who became the mothers of new generations, would easily grow into a sort of worship of the totem; the adoption of the totem name from the circumstances of birth implying the origin of the name from within the group and not from without would, as aggregation took the place of segregation, give way before the association of groups of persons with common interests; the aggregate totem name would come to the separate local totems as soon as, but not before, aggregation had taken the place of segregation in the formation of the social system, and this was not at the earliest stage; the close association of the totems with groups of mothers who always took the fathers of their children from without the mother group, would readily develop into differentiating the mother totems within the group from the totems of the fathers without the group, and this differentiation would produce a special relationship between the sexes based upon the difference of totems instead of upon the sameness of them; and finally there would be produced first a two-class division founded on sex—all the mothers and all the fathers—and, only in a developed form, a two-class division founded on the accepted totem name.

If this is a probable view of the course of totemic evolution, we may more confidently refer to its final stages for further evidence. Advanced totemic society[Pg261] shows a constant tendency to substitute blood kinship for the association with natural objects: first, blood kinship with the mother, then with the mother and the father, finally recognised through the father only. At this last stage, blood kinship has practically succeeded in expelling totemic association altogether in favour of tribal kinship by blood descent, for totemism with male descent as the basis of the social group is totemism in name only; the names of totemism remain but they are applied to kinship tribes or sections of tribes, and they do duty therefore as a convenient name-system without reference to their origin in definite association with the naming animal or plant; and it is already in position to surrender also the names and outward signs. Blood kinship is therefore the destroyer, not the generator, of totemism, and we are therefore compelled to get at the back of blood kinship if we want to find totem beginnings.

This is an important aspect of the case, and it is one which, I think, cannot be ignored. We have found that rudimentary totemism was the basis of a social system founded on artificial associations with animal or plant, was therefore kinless in character; and we have found that when totemism has been carried on into a society developed upon the recognition of blood kinship, blood kinship became antagonistic to totemism, and ultimately displaced it. These two facts point to the rudimentary kinless system as the true origin of totemism.

[Pg262]

III

Now we may test these conclusions by applying the theory they contain to an actual case of totemic society. It would be well to choose for this purpose a people who had specialised their totemic organisation, and there are only two supreme instances of this among the races of the world—the North American Indians and the Australians. Everywhere else, where totemism exists, it is not the dominant feature of the social organisation. In Asia and in Africa totemism is subordinate to, or at all events in close or equal association with, other elements, and we cannot be quite sure that we have in these cases pure totemism. North American totemism is in the most advanced stage. Australian totemism is to a very considerable degree less advanced, and it is therefore to Australian totemism I shall turn for evidence.

But even here it is necessary to bear in mind that primitive as the Australians are, they are not so primitive as to be in the primary stages of totemic society. They have developed, and developed strongly along totemic lines, and we know that such development once started has the capacity to proceed far. What we have to do, therefore, is to attempt to penetrate beneath the range of development, to search for the social group at the farthest from the centre point from which migration started, to discover, if we can, relics of group hostility, hostile capture of women and of kinless society, all of which belong to the primary stage from which totemic development has taken place. If we can do this, we may hope to arrive at the origin of[Pg263] totemism, and we are more likely to accomplish it in the case of the Australians than with any other people. If we cannot, as Mr. Lang alleges, anywhere see "absolutely primitive man and a totemic system in the making,"[366] we may go back along the lines from which totemism has developed in Australian society and see somewhat of the process of the making.

We may commence with evidence of the survival of the most primitive human trait, the condition of hostility among the local groups produced by the struggle for women. "The possession of a girl appears to be connected with all their ideas of fighting ... after a battle the girls do not always follow their fugitive husbands from the field, but frequently go over as a matter of course to the victors, even with young children on their backs."[367] Mr. Curr puts the evidence even more definitely in a primitive setting when he informs us of "the young bachelors of the tribe carrying off some of the girl wives of the grey-beards," leaving the old territory and settling at the first convenient place within thirty or forty miles of the old territory. I call this state of things "survival,"[368] because it is the existence in totemic society of the fundamental basis of pre-totemic society. It is checked in Australian totemic society by rules which show a strong development from the primitive. Thus the successful warrior may not take any of his captives to himself; "if a warrior took to himself a captive who[Pg264] belonged to a forbidden class, he would be hunted down like a wild beast," is the evidence of Mr. Fison, who allows it to be "a strong statement, but it rests upon strong evidence."[369] This is the exogamous class system operating even in the case of conflict, when men have resorted to their primitive instincts and their primitive methods.

This discovery of primitive hostility accompanying the obtaining of wives leads us to look for other survivals of the earliest conditions, and we come upon mother-right groups in which the females in each local group are the sexual companions of males from outside their own social group. This is shown by the Kamilaroi organisation, where "a woman is married to a thousand miles of husbands."[370] This phrase may be textually an exaggeration of actual fact, but it undoubtedly expresses a condition of things which actually existed. Women in Australian society must look outside their class, and in general outside their totem, for their sexual mates, and they must expect to be claimed as rightful sexual mates by men whom they have never seen and who live at great distances. Carry this state of things but a few steps back, and we must come to a condition of localised female groups with males moving from group to group. Surely there is something more here than savage organisation. The something more is the development into a system of one of the results of the enforced migratory conditions of early man, namely, the migratory instincts of the males moving outside the female local groups and thus producing natural[Pg265] exogamy. This is what appears to me to be clearly a distinct element in the Australian system. But there is a new element in juxtaposition with it. The new element is the organisation into marriage classes—not every man from without, but only special men from without, are allowed the sexual companionship.

Now in both these cases, where we have apparently penetrated to the most primitive conditions, we are also brought up abruptly against conditions which are not primitive, namely, the exogamous class system, and we are bound to conclude that this class system thus shows itself to be an intruding force which has not, however, been strong enough to quite obliterate the older forces of hostile marriage-capture and mother-right society.

Our next quest is therefore to find out, if we can, an explanation of these two contrasted elements in Australian totemic society, and for this purpose it is advisable to still further narrow down the range of inquiry to one special section of the Australian peoples. For this purpose I shall take the Arunta. There has been much controversy about this people. Mr. Lang argues that the presence of exogamous classes and male descent shows the Arunta to be more advanced than other Australian peoples;[371] Messrs. Spencer and Gillen that the survival of totem beliefs, which are local and unconnected with the class system, proves them to be the least advanced. In this country Mr. Hartland and Mr. Thomas side with Mr. Lang; Mr. Frazer with Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.

The first point of importance to note about the[Pg266] Arunta people is that they occupy the least favourable districts for food supply.[372] This means that they have been pushed there. They did not choose such a location—in other words, they are among the last units of the migration movements which peopled Australia; they are among the last people to have become stationary as a group, and to have been compelled to resort to the development of social organisation in lieu of constantly swarming off from the centre or from the last stopping place to the ends. This tells for primitive, not advanced, conditions.

The next point is the totem system. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, describing one special case as an example of the rest, give us the following particulars. The Arunta believe that the most marked features of the district they inhabit, the gaps and the gorges, were formed by their Alcheringa ancestors. These Alcheringa are represented as collected together in companies, each of which consisted of a certain number of individuals belonging to one particular totem. Each of these Alcheringa ancestors carried about with him or her one or more of the sacred stones called churinga. These are the general traditions related by the Arunta of to-day to explain their own customs, and let it be noted that the explanation does not necessarily lead us to the primitive conceptions of the Arunta people, but to their present conceptions as to unknown facts. The local example is found close to Alice Springs, where there are deposited a large number of churinga carried by the witchetty grub men and women. A large number of prominent rocks and boulders, and certain[Pg267] ancient gum trees, are the nanja trees and rocks of these spirits. If a woman conceives a child after having been near to this gap, it is one of these spirit individuals which has entered her body, and when born must of necessity be of the witchetty grub totem; "it is, in fact, nothing else but the reincarnation of one of the witchetty grub people of the Alcheringa;" the nanja tree, or stone, ever afterwards is the nanja of the child, and there is special connection between it and the child, injury to the nanja object meaning injury to the nanja man.[373] There is evidence that the reincarnation theory is not admissible,[374] and, indeed, it does not seem warranted on the facts presented by the authors. With this unnecessary element out of the way, then, there is left a system of local totemism, arising at birth and depending upon the mother, without reference in any way to the father, associated with natural features, rocks and trees, and showing in a special way a curious system of sex cleavage by the men of the group being the exclusive guardians of the sacred churinga, and the women the active power by which the churinga becomes connected with the newly-born member of the totem group.[375]

Now at this point we may surely refer back to the custom and belief of the Semang people of the Malay Peninsula, and I suggest that we have the closest parallel between Semang belief and custom and Arunta totemism, not quite the same formula perhaps, but[Pg268] assuredly the same fundamental conception of every child at birth being in intimate association with objects of nature, and this association being the determining force of the newly-born man's social status and class, lasting all through life. In each case the kinless basis of totemism is thus fully shown. The totem names given by women, or assumed on account of the conditions attachable to women as mothers, did not extend to the human fathers. The fathers may be known or unknown to the mothers, but they did not become associated with the totems which the mothers associated with their children. To the extent of fatherhood, therefore, totemism of this type was clearly not based upon the natural fact of blood kinship, but upon the conscious adoption of a non-kinship form of society. To the extent of motherhood also it was not based upon blood kinship, for it was the local totem, not the mother's totem, which became the totem of the newly-born member of the group. We thus have an entirely non-kinship form of society to deal with, a kinless society, "where there is no necessary relationship of any kind between that of children and parents."[376] Primitive man consciously adapted certain of his observations of nature to his social needs, and among these observations the fact of actual blood kinship with father and mother played no part. It would appear therefore that totemism at its foundation was based upon a theoretical conception of relationship between man and animal or plant. Place of birth, association with natural objects, not motherhood and not fatherhood, are the determining factors.

[Pg269] We may proceed to inquire as to the social form which has become evolved from this kinless system.

In the case of the Semangs we have the kinless totemic belief and custom existing within a kinless society. In the case of the Arunta we have the kinless totemism existing in a society based on a kinless organisation still, but containing also full recognition of motherhood,[377] and perhaps recognition of physical fatherhood.[378] There is, therefore, an important distinction in the social position of the two parallel systems. Among the Semang people, their totemic belief and custom do not carry with them a superstructure of society. They form the substantive cult of the scattered social groups, which are kinless groups dependent upon ties local in character and derived from the conscious use of the facts of nature surrounding them. Among the Arunta people, on the contrary, the totem belief and custom are contained within a social system of extraordinary dimensions and proportions. Of course, the obvious questions to raise are—have the Semang people lost a once existing social system connected with their totemic cult? Have the Arunta people had imposed upon them a social system which has not destroyed their primitive totemic cult?

To answer these questions I can only deal with the Semang evidence as it appears in researches of great authority and weight, and there is undoubtedly in all the evidence produced by Messrs. Skeat and[Pg270] Blagden, and the authorities they use, nothing whatever to suggest that Semang totemism once possessed above it an elaborate social organisation of the usual totemic type. There is indeed, the myth which points to a two-class exogamous division for marital purposes,[379] but there is more than myth for the unrestricted intercourse of the sexes both before and after marital rights.[380] In every other direction we get simple groups fashioned on no larger basis than nomadic roaming and journeying to fresh food grounds. On the other hand, there is much to suggest that the Arunta have a dual system of organisation; one, in which the primitive types are still surviving, the second, a more advanced type which covers but does not crush out the first. If this is so, it is clear that the parallel between Semang and Arunta totemism is considerably closer than at first appears.

It will be necessary, therefore, to deal with the two principal signs of alleged Arunta progress, male descent and the exogamous classes. I see no evidence whatever of male descent; male ascendancy, a very different thing, appears, but there cannot strictly be male descent where fatherhood is unrecognised. And here I would interpose the remark that the use of the term descent, male descent and female descent, in these studies is far too indiscriminate.[381] Descent means succession by blood kinship by acknowledged sons or daughters, and this is exactly what does not always[Pg271] occur. Sonship and daughtership in our sense of the term are not always known to savagery. They were not known to the Arunta males, for fatherhood was not recognised by them and motherhood was not definitely used in the social sense. All that the Arunta can be said to have developed is a mother-right society with male ascendancy in the group.[382] Group sons succeeded to group fathers, but individual descent from father to son there is not.

There remain the exogamous classes. In the first place, it is necessary to get rid of a difficulty raised by Mr. Lang. "In no tribe with female descent can a district have its local totem as among the Arunta.... This can only occur under male reckoning of descent."[383] But surely so acute an observer as Mr. Lang would see that with female descent right through, as it exists among the Khasia and Kocch people of Assam, local totem centres are just as possible as with male descent. Mr. Lang is conscious of some discrepancy here, for a little later on he repeats the statement that local totem centres "can only occur and exist under male reckoning of descent," but adds the significant qualification "in cases where the husbands do not go to the wives' region of abode."[384] This is the whole point. Where husbands do go to the wives' region of abode, as they do among the Khasis and the Kocch, female descent[Pg272] would allow of the formation of local totem centres. This is not far from the position of the Arunta. They are mother-right societies. The mother secures the totem name. The father, de facto, is not father according to the ideas of the Arunta people, is at best only one of a group of possible fathers according to the practices of the Arunta people. Therefore, the local totem centre is formed out of a system which may be called a mother-right system for the purpose of scientific description, but which is not even a mother-right system to the natives, because motherhood is not the foundation of the local group.

Secondly, we have the important fact, which Mr. Lang has duly noted, though he does not apparently see its significance in the argument as to origins, that the class system "arose in a given centre and was propagated by emigrants and was borrowed by distant tribes."[385] Messrs. Spencer and Gillen distinctly affirm that the "division into eight has been adopted (or rather the names for the four new divisions have been) in recent times by the Arunta tribe from the Ilpirra tribe which adjoins the former on the north, and the use of them is at the present time spreading southwards."[386] This view is supported by the widespread organisation of eaglehawk and crow, and by the general homogeneity of Australian social forms. It is clear, therefore, that room is made for the external organisation of the class system and the consequent[Pg273] production of the dual characteristics of the Arunta—the joint product of the fossilisation of mother-right society at the end of the migration movement, and the superimposing upon this fossilisation, with its tendency towards the class system, of the fully organised class system. The two systems are not now fully welded in the Arunta group. Whatever view is taken of these, whether they be considered advanced or primal, the undoubted dualism has to be accounted for, and the best way of accounting for this dualism is, I submit, that of differential evolution. Further study of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work, together with the criticisms of various scholars, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Thomas, and others, convinces me that the extreme artificiality of the class system is due partly to a want of understanding of the entire facts, and partly to the ad hoc adoption by the natives themselves of new plans to meet difficulties which must arise out of a too close adhesion to their rules. Mr. Lang has allowed me to see a manuscript note of his, in which he points out that the inevitable result of the one totem to the one totem rule of marital relationship,—that is, totem A always intermarrying with totem B, males and females from both totems, and with no others,—is the consanguineous relationship of all the members of the two totems. The rule for non-consanguineous marriage has therefore broken down, and when it breaks down the Australian introduces a new rule which satisfies immediate necessities. When this in turn breaks down a further new rule is made, and this is the way I think the differing rules resulted. They represent, therefore, not varying degrees of[Pg274] culture progress, but only varying degrees of artificial social changes, and they spring from the oldest conditions of all where there is no class system at all.[387] Arunta society is not a "sport" under this view, but a product—a product to be accounted for and explained by anthropological rules, derived not only from Australian society but from the general facts of human society which have remained for observation by the science of to-day. The parallel between Semang and Arunta, therefore, helps us in two ways. It enables us to go back to Semang totemism as an example of primitive kinless society, and forward to Arunta totemism as an example of early development therefrom. We have, in point of fact, discovered the datum line of totemism. Upon this may be constructed the various examples according to their degrees of development, and we may thus see in detail the commencing elements of totemism as well as the means by which we may proceed from the commencing elements to the more advanced elements, and finally to the last stages of totemic society where blood kinship is fully recognised and used, where, in fact, totemic tribes as distinct from totemic peoples take their place in the world's history.

IV

I do not propose in this chapter to proceed further with this inquiry. It will not advance my object, nor is it absolutely necessary. Totemism in the full has been described adequately by Mr. Frazer in his valuable abstract of the evidence supplied from all parts of[Pg275] the world, and there is not much in dispute among the authorities when once the stage of origin is passed. There is danger, however, at the other extreme, namely, the attempt to discover totemism in impossible places in civilisation. Mr. Morgan has shown us totemic society in its highest form of development, untouched by other influences of sufficient consequence to divert its natural evolution. This, I think, is the merit of Mr. Morgan's great work, and not his attempt, his futile attempt as I think, to apply the principles of totemic society to the elucidation of societies that have long passed the stage of totemism. In particular, the great European civilisations are not totemic, nor are they to be seen passing from totemism. It is true that Mr. Lang, Mr. Grant Allen, and others have attempted to trace in certain features of Greek ritual and belief, and in certain tribal formations discoverable in Anglo-Saxon Britain, the relics of a living totemism in the civilised races of Europe;[388] but I do not believe either of these scholars would have endorsed his early conclusions in later studies. Mr. Grant Allen did not, so far as I know, repeat this theory after its first publication, and Mr. Lang has given many signs of being willing to withdraw it. The fact is, there is no necessity to think of Greek or English totem society because in Greece and England there are traces of totem beliefs. We may disengage them from their national position and put them back to the position they occupied before the coming of Greek or Englishman into the countries they have made their own.

[Pg276] In that position there may well have been totemic peoples in Britain of the type we have been considering from Australia. I have already indicated that totemic survivals in folklore have been the subject of a special study of my own which still in the main stands good, and for which I have collected very many additional illustrations and proofs. I discovered that folklore contained some remarkably perfect examples of totemic belief and custom, and also a considerable array of scattered belief and custom connected with animals and plants which, unclassified, seemed to lead to no definite stage of culture history, yet when classified, undoubtedly led to totemism. The result was somewhat remarkable. At many points there are direct parallels to savage totemism, and the whole associated group of customs received adequate explanation only on the theory that it represented the detritus of a once existing totemic system of belief.

The present study enables me to take the parallel to primitive totemism much closer. One of the perfect examples was of a local character. This was found in Ossory. Giraldus Cambrensis tells an extraordinary legend to the following effect: "A priest benighted in a wood on the borders of Meath was confronted by a wolf, who after some preliminary explanations gave this account of himself: There are two of us, a man and a woman, natives of Ossory, who through the curse of one Natalis, saint and abbot, are compelled every seven years to put off the human form and depart from the dwellings of men. Quitting entirely the human form, we assume that of wolves. At the end of the seven years, if they chance to survive, two[Pg277] others being substituted in their places, they return to their country and their former shape."[389] Here is a saintly legend introduced to explain the current tradition of the men of Ossory, that they periodically turned into wolves. Fynes Moryson, in 1603, ridiculed the beliefs of "some Irish who will be believed as men of credit," that men in Ossory were "yearly turned into wolves."[390] But an ancient Irish MS. puts the matter much more clearly in the statement that the "descendants of the wolf are in Ossory,"[391] while the evidence of Spenser and Camden explains the popular beliefs upon even more exact lines. Spenser says "that some of the Irish doe use to make the wolf their gossip;"[392] and Camden adds that they term them "Chari Christi, praying for them and wishing them well, and having contracted this intimacy, professed to have no fear from their four-footed allies." Fynes Moryson expressly mentions the popular dislike to killing wolves, and they were not extirpated until the eighteenth century.[393] Aubrey adds that "in Ireland they value the fang-tooth of an wolfe, which they set in silver and gold as we doe ye Coralls;"[394] and Camden notes the similar use of a bit of wolf's skin.[395]

In the local superstitions of Ossory, therefore, we have several of the cardinal features of savage totemism, the descent from the totem-animal, the ascription[Pg278] to the totem of a sacred character, the belief in its protection, and a taboo against killing it. I will venture to suggest, however, that to these important features there is to be added a parallel in survival to the Semang and Arunta features where the local circumstances of birth are the determining forces which supply the totem name, for the relationship of "gossip," "god-sib," is clearly of the same character as that of the soul-tree of the Semang and the alcheringa of the Australian.[396] The condition of survival has altered the detail of the parallel, but the parallel is on the same plane.

The wolf as gossip to the men of Ossory leads us on to inquire whether any other animal had such close connections with human beings. In Erris, a part of Connaught, "the people consider that foxes perfectly understand human language, that they can be propitiated by kindness, and even moved by flattery. They not only make mittens for Reynard's feet to keep him warm in winter, and deposit these articles carefully near their holes, but they make them sponsors for their children, supposing that under the close and long-established relationship of Gossipred they will be induced to befriend them."[397] Thus it appears that the selfsame conception which the men of Ossory had in the thirteenth century for the wolf, the men of Erris[Pg279] had for the fox in the nineteenth century. No explanation from the dry details of the natural history of these animals is sufficient to account for this curious parallel, and we must turn to ancient beliefs for the explanation.

The general attitude of the men of Erris towards the fox is confirmed as an attribute of totemism when we come to examine a special local form of it. This we can do by turning to Galway. The Claddagh fishermen in Galway would not go out to fish if they saw a fox: their rivals of a neighbouring village, not believing in the fox, do all they can to introduce a fox into the Claddagh village.[398] These people are peculiar in many respects, and are distinctively clannish. They retain their old clan-dress—blue cloaks and red petticoats—which distinguishes them from the rest of the county of Galway, and it may be conjectured that the present-day custom of naming from the names of fish—thus, Jack the hake, Bill the cod, Joe the eel, Pat the trout, Mat the turbot, etc.[399]—may be a remnant of the mental attitude of the folk towards that belief in kinship between men and animals which is at the basis of totemism. But, returning to the fox, we have in the belief that meeting this animal would prevent them from going out to fish, a parallel to the prohibition against looking at the totem which is to be found among savage people, and we have in the neighbours' disbelief in the fox and a corresponding belief in the[Pg280] hare,[400] that local distribution of different totems which is also found in savagery. But all these particulars about the relationship of the fox to the Claddagh fishermen receive unexpected light when we inquire into the biography of their local saint, named MacDara. This saint is the patron saint of the fishermen who, when passing MacDara's island, always dip their sails thrice to avoid being shipwrecked. But then, in the folk-belief, we have this remarkable fact, that MacDara's real name was Sinach, a fox[401]—an instance, it would seem, of a totem cult being transferred to a Christian saint. Thus, then, in the superstitions of these Claddagh fisherfolk we can trace the elements of totemism, the root of which is contained, first, in the nominal worship of a Christian saint, and second, in the actual worship of an animal, the fox.

These examples of local totemism may be followed by a remarkable example of tribal or kinship totemism. It was noted by Mr. G.H. Kinahan in his researches for Irish folklore, and is mentioned quite incidentally among other items, the collector himself not fully perceiving the importance of his "find." This really enhances the value of the evidence, because it destroys any possibility of an objection to its validity—a really important matter, considering the remarkable character of this survival of totem-stocks in Western Europe. The exact words of Mr. Kinahan are as follows:—

"In very ancient times some of the clan Coneely, one of the early septs of the county, were changed by[Pg281] 'art magick' into seals; since then no Coneely can kill a seal without afterwards having bad luck. Seals are called Coneelys, and on this account many of the name changed it to Connolly."[402] The same local tradition is mentioned by Hardiman in one of his notes to O'Flaherty's Description of West or H-iar Connaught,[403] but the note is equally significant of genuineness from the fact that the tradition is styled[Pg282] "a ridiculous story." It strengthens Mr. Kinahan's note in the following passage: "In some places the story has its believers, who would no more kill a seal, or eat of a slaughtered one, than they would of a human Coneely."

The clan Coneely is mentioned both by Mr. Kinahan and by Mr. Hardiman as one of the oldest Irish septs; and that it is widely spread, and not congregated into one locality, is to be inferred from the description of the tradition as prevalent in Connaught, especially from Mr. Hardiman's words, describing that "in some places" the story has its believers now; and hence we may conclude that wherever the clan Coneely are situated there would exist this totem belief.

The full significance of these facts may best be tested by reference to the conditions laid down by Dr. Robertson Smith for the discovery of the survivals of totemism among the Semitic races. These conditions are as follows:—

Now in the Irish case all three of these conditions are found together in the same tribe, the clan Coneely, and it is impossible to overlook the importance of such a discovery. It proves from survivals in folklore that totemistic people once lived in ancient Ireland, just as the corresponding evidence proved that the ancient Semitic stock possessed the totemic organisation.

We have now examined the most archaic forms of the survival of totemism in Britain. If we pass on to inquire whether we can detect the more scattered and decayed remnants of totem beliefs and customs, we turn to Mr. Frazer as our guide. From Mr. Frazer's review of the beliefs and customs incidental to the totemistic organisation of savage people, it is possible to extract a formula for ascertaining the classification of savage beliefs and practices incidental to totemism. This formula appears to me to properly fall into the following groups:—

My suggestion is that if a reasonable proportion of the superstitions and customs attaching to animals and plants, preserved to us as folklore, can be classified under these heads this is exactly what might be expected if the origin of such superstitions and customs is to be sought for in a primitive system of totemism which prevailed amongst the people once occupying these islands. The clan Coneely and the Ossory wolves are proofs that such a system existed, and if such perfect survivals have been able to descend to modern times, in spite of the influences of civilisation, there is no primâ facie reason why the beliefs and customs incidental to such a system should not have survived, even though they are no longer to be identified with special clans. When once a primitive belief or custom becomes separated from its original surroundings, it would be liable to change. Thus, when the wolf totem of Ossory passes into a local cultus, we meet with the belief that human beings may be transformed into animal forms, as the derivative from the totem belief in descent from the wolf. Fortunately, the process by which this change took place is discernible in the Ossory example; but it will not be so in other examples, and we may therefore assume that the Ossory example represents the transitional form and apply it as a key to the origin of similar beliefs elsewhere.

Again, if we endeavour to discover how the associated totem-beliefs of the clan Coneely would appear in folklore supposing they had been scattered by the influences of civilisation, we can see that at the various[Pg285] places where members of the clan had resided for some time there would be preserved fragments of the once perfect totem-belief. Thus, one place would retain traditions about a fabulous animal who could change into human form; another place would preserve beliefs about its being unlucky to kill a seal (or some other animal specially connected with the locality); another place would preserve a superstitious regard for the seal (or some other local animal) as an augury; and thus the process of transference of beliefs into folklore, from one form into other related forms, from one particular object connected with the clan to several objects connected with the localities, would go on from time to time, until the difficulty of tracing the original of the scattered beliefs and customs would be well-nigh insurmountable without some key. But having once proved the existence of such examples as the clan Coneely and the Ossory wolves, this difficulty, though still great, is very much lessened. Our method would be as follows. We first of all postulate that totem peoples did actually exist in ancient Britain, or whence such extraordinary survivals? We next examine and classify the beliefs and customs which are incidental to totemism in savage society, and having set these forth by the aid of Mr. Frazer's admirable study on the subject, we ascertain what parallels to these beliefs and customs may be found in the folklore of Britain. And then our position seems to be very clearly defined. We prove that in folklore certain customs and superstitions are identical, or nearly so, with the beliefs and customs of totemism among savage tribes, and we conclude that this identity in form proves an identity in origin, and[Pg286] therefore that this section of folklore originated from the totemistic people of early Britain.

I shall not take up all these points on the present occasion, especially as they have in all essentials appeared in the study to which I have referred; but as an example of the scattering of totem beliefs I will refer to the well-known passage in Cæsar (lib. v. cap. xii.), from which we learn that certain people in Britain were forbidden to eat the hare, the cock, or the goose, and see whether this does not receive its only explanation by reference to the totemic restriction against using the totem for food. Mr. Elton, with this passage in his mind, notices that "there were certain restrictions among the Britons and ancient Irish, by which particular nations or tribes were forbidden to kill or eat certain kinds of animals;" and he goes on to suggest that "it seems reasonable to connect the rule of abstaining from certain kinds of food with the superstitious belief that the tribes were descended from the animals from which their names and crests or badges were derived."[405]

Let us see whether this reasonable conjecture holds good. The most famous example is that of Cuchulainn, the celebrated Irish chieftain, whose name means the hound of Culain. It is said that he might not eat of the flesh of the dog, and he came by his death after transgressing this totemistic taboo. The words of the manuscript known as the Book of Leinster are singularly significant in their illustration of this view. "And one of the things that Cúchulainn was bound not to do was going to a cooking hearth and[Pg287] consuming the food [i.e. the dog]; and another of the things that he must not do was eating his namesake's flesh."[406] Diarmaid, whose name seems to be continued in the current popular Irish name for pig (Darby), was intimately associated with that animal, and his life depended on the life of the boar.[407] These examples are so much to the point that we may examine the cases mentioned by Cæsar from the same standard.

Mr. Frazer points out that even among existing totem-tribes the respect for the totem has lessened or disappeared, and among the results of this he notes instances where, if any one kills his totem, he apologises to the animal. Under such an interpretation as this, we may surely classify a "memorandum" made by Bishop White-Kennett about the hare, the first of the British totems mentioned by Cæsar: "When one keepes a hare alive and feedeth him till he have occasion to eat him, if he telles before he kills him that he will doe so, the hare will thereupon be found dead, having killed himself."[408] But respect for the hare, in accordance with totem ideas, was carried further than this at Biddenham, where, on the 22nd September, a little procession of villagers carried a white rabbit [a substitute for hare] decorated with scarlet ribbons through the village, singing a hymn in honour of St. Agatha. All the young unmarried women who chanced to meet the procession extended the first two[Pg288] fingers of the left hand pointing towards the rabbit, at the same time repeating the following doggerel:—

This points to a very ancient custom, not yet fully explained, but which clearly had for its object the reverential burying of a rabbit or hare. It is characteristic of the totem animal that it serves as an omen to its clansmen, and we find that the hare is an omen in Britain. Boudicca is said to have drawn an augury from a hare, taken from her bosom, and which when released pursued a course that was deemed fortunate for her attack upon the Roman army;[410] and in modern south Northamptonshire the running of a hare along the street or mainway of a village portends fire to some house in the immediate vicinity.[411] In 1648 Sir Thomas Browne tells us that in his time there were few above three-score years that were not perplexed when a hare crossed their path.[412] In Wilts and in Scotland it was unlucky to meet a hare, but the evil influence did not extend after the next meal had been taken.[413] Then, too, the prohibition against naming the totem object is found in north-east Scotland attached to the hare, whose name may not be pronounced at sea, and Mr. Gregor adds the significant fact that some animal names and certain family names[Pg289] were never pronounced by the inhabitants of some of the villages, each village having an aversion to one or more of the words.[414] A classification of the beliefs and customs connected with the hare takes us, indeed, to almost every phase of totemistic belief, and it is impossible to reject such a mass of cumulative evidence.

Of the second of the British food taboos mentioned by Cæsar we have the most perfect illustration in the instance of the Irish chieftain, Conaire, who, descended from a fowl, was interdicted from eating its flesh.[415]

Turning next to the goose, we find that at Great Crosby, in Lancashire, there is held an annual festival which is called the "Goose Fair," and although it is accompanied by great feasting, the singular fact remains that the goose itself, in whose honour the feast seems to have been held, is considered too sacred to eat, and is never touched by the villagers.[416] In Scotland also the goose was never eaten, being too sacred for food.[417]

Thus the hare, the fowl, and the goose have retained their sacred character in a special manner in various parts of the country, and I may add a further note of more general significance. In Scotland there exists a prejudice against eating hares and cocks and hens.[418] In the south-western parts of England the peasant would not eat hares, rabbits, wild-fowl, or poultry, and when asked whence this dislike proceeds, he[Pg290] asserts that it was derived from his father[419]—the traditional sanction which is so essential to folklore.[420]

The ideas surrounding these three special animals might be easily extended to others, but I will only observe that Mr. Elton, noting both the classical and modern accounts of certain districts in Scotland and Ireland where fish, though abundant, is tabooed as food, quotes with approval a modern suggestion that this abstinence was a religious observance.[421] That fish are carved on numerous stones is a curious commentary on this assertion, while another point to be noted is that the inhabitants of the various islands have each their peculiar notions as to what fish are good for food. Some will eat skate, some dog-fish, some eat limpets and razor-fish, and as a matter of course, says Miss Gordon Cumming, those who do not, despise those who do.[422] A prejudice also existed against white cows in Scotland, and Dalyell ventures upon the acute supposition that this was on account of the unlawfulness of consuming the product of a consecrated animal.[423] These are not stray notes of inexperienced observers, and with two centuries between them it must be that they contain the essence of the people's conception—a conception which leads us back to totemism for its explanation.

[Pg291] I do not think we could get closer to totemic beliefs and ideas than this, nor could we have a better example of the necessity of examining early historical data by anthropological tests and by folklore parallels. Cæsar's words are unimportant by themselves. They convey nothing of any significance to the modern reader—a mere dietetic peculiarity which means nothing and counts for nothing. And yet it might be considered certain that Cæsar knew that the details he recorded were of importance in the historical sense. He did not indicate what the importance was, probably because he was not aware of it; but because he was conscious that among the influences which counted with these people were the food taboos, he rightly recorded the facts. They have remained unconsidered trifles until now, when anthropology has brought them within the range of scientific observation, and they are now to be reckoned with as part of the material which tells of the culture conditions of a section of the early British peoples.

I must here interpose a remark with reference to this grouping of the evidence. Apart from the significance of the superstitions as they are recorded in their bare condition among the peasantry, there is the additional fact to note that the superstition against eating or killing certain animals or birds, or against looking at them or naming them, etc., is not universal. It obtains in one place and not in another. If the injunction not to kill, injure, or eat a certain animal were simply the reflection of a universal practice, such a practice might originate in some attribute of the animal itself which characteristically would produce or tend to[Pg292] produce superstition. But the spread of this class of superstition in certain districts, and not in others, is indicative of an ancient origin, and it is exactly what might be expected to have been produced from totem-peoples. Unfortunately, neither the negative evidence of superstitious beliefs nor the local distribution of superstitious beliefs has ever been considered worthy of attention. But some little evidence is incidentally forthcoming, and I would submit that this may be taken as indicative of what might be obtained more fully by further research into this neglected aspect of folklore. I drew Miss Burne's attention to this subject, and she has noted some particulars in her valuable Shropshire Folklore.[424] But for the most part this portion of our evidence wants picking out by a long and tedious process from the mass of badly recorded facts about popular superstitions. I do not believe in the generally stated opinion that certain superstitions are universally believed or practised. It is difficult to prove a negative, and such evidence is not absolutely scientific, but when it comes in direct antithesis to positive, there does not seem any harm in accepting it. Every class of superstition wants tracing out geographically, and local variants want careful noting. I cannot doubt if this were properly done that many so-called universal superstitions would be found to be distinctly local. In the meantime, it is not with universal superstitions that we have to deal. It is primarily with those local variants which show us side by side the differences of belief. It is[Pg293] thus that we can afford evidence of that intermixture of totem-objects which is to be expected from the known facts of totem-beliefs and customs. Indeed, Mr. McLennan has laid it down that "we might expect that while here and there perhaps a tribe might appear with a single animal god, as a general rule tribes and nations should have as many animal and vegetable gods as there were distinct stocks in the population ... we should not expect to find the same animal dominant in all quarters, or worshipped even everywhere within the same nation."[425]

It is important that we should thoroughly understand what these survivals of totemism in the British isles really mean. On the extreme west coast of Ireland, farthest away from the centres of civilisation, there are found these unique examples of a savage institution. The argument that they might have been transplanted thither by travellers from the far west, where totemism has developed to its highest form, cannot seriously be advanced. The argument that they might be the accidental form into which some merely superstitious fancies of ignorant peasants happened to have ultimately shaped themselves, is met by the mathematical demonstration that the ratio of chance against such a development would be well-nigh incalculable. The remaining argument is that they indicate the last outpost, or perhaps one of the last outposts, of a primitive savage organisation which once existed throughout these lands. This is the view that appears to me to be the only possible one to meet all the conditions of the case; one proof in[Pg294] support of this view being the discovery of evidence in other parts of the country which shows that totemism has left its stamp in more or less perfect form upon the traditional beliefs and practices of the nation. Though we are not able to identify further complete examples of the same type as the seal clan of Western Ireland, or the wolf people of Ossory, we should be able, if the explanation I have advanced of their origin be the correct one, to produce examples of the varying forms which such an institution as totemism must have assumed when it had been broken up by the advance of civilising influences. If the seal clan, or the wolf clan, is in truth the last outpost of a savage organisation, there will be in the lands less remote from the centres of civilisation some evidences of the break-up of savagery as it has been driven westward. Somewhere in tradition, somewhere in local observances of beliefs or superstition, there must still be echoes, more or less faint, but still echoes, from totemism. Having discovered these undoubted examples of totemism, the argument shifts its ground. We can no longer say that the theory of totemism may possibly explain some of the customs and traditions of the people. We are, by the logic of the position, compelled to say that custom and tradition must have preserved many relics of totemism, and that so far from seeking to explain custom and tradition by the theory of totemism, we must seek to explain the survival of totemism by custom and tradition. I lay stress on this view of the case because it is hard to combat the views of those who look upon "mere superstition" as no explanation of primitive originals. To[Pg295] us of the present day the beliefs of the peasantry are no doubt properly definable as "mere superstition." But when we examine it as folklore we are seeking for its origin, not for its modern aspect; we are asking how "mere superstition" first arose, and in what forms, not how it exists; we are pushing back the inquiry from to-day when it exists side by side with a philosophical and moral religion to the time when it existed as the sole substitute for philosophy and morals. Even if it is "mere superstition" it has a dateless history. It is not conceivable that it suddenly arose at a particular period before which "mere superstition" did not exist, and all, both peasant and chief, were philosophical and moral. It is not conceivable that the mere superstition of to-day has replaced bodily the mere superstition of other ages. Every succeeding age of progress has influenced it, no doubt, but not eradicated it, and hence the mere superstition of to-day has just such an unbroken continuity of history as language or institutions. That we are able to pick out from among its items undoubted forms of totemism, and that we may add to these complete examples a classified grouping of customs and beliefs in survival parallel to the customs and beliefs of savage totemism, affords proof that at least we may carry back that history to the era of totemism, at whatever point that era may cross the line of, or come into contact with, political history.

This is the definite conclusion to be drawn from the anthropological interpretation of the presence of totemic beliefs among the survivals of folklore. The study of the anthropological conditions has occupied[Pg296] a wide range of thought and inquiry, but it leads us back to a safe basis for research, for it brings definitely within touch of that realm of man which lies outside the civilisation wherein folklore is embedded, the peoples who have made, and the peoples who are dominated by, that civilisation. The savage of Britain cannot with this evidence before us be considered as the mere product of the literature of Greece and Rome. He is part and parcel of the savagery of the human race. Anthropology has shown us that savagery reached the land we now call Britain as part of the general movement of people which has caused the whole earth to become a dwelling-place for man, and now that we know this we must appeal to anthropology whenever we find that the problems of folklore take us out of the culture period of a civilisation known to history.[426]

[Pg297]

APPENDIX

I append a synopsis of the culture-structure of the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula (references are to Skeat and Blagden's Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula where not otherwise specified), in order that the position claimed for the one section of totemic belief may be tested by the remaining characteristics of Semang culture. I claim that there is nothing that remains which is inconsistent with the interpretation given of the totemic items.

Physical:—

(a). Live exclusively in the forest surrounded by hostile fauna (i. 13).

(b). Food consists of such wild vegetable food as may happen to fall from time to time in season (i. 109, 341, 525), together with small mammals and birds (i. 112), fish (i. 113).

(c). As soon as they have exhausted the sources of food in one neighbourhood they move on to the next (i. 109).

(d). Fire obtained by friction (i. 111, 113), but meat is eaten raw (i. 112).

(e). Nudity is alleged (Journ. Indian Archipelago, i. 252; ii. 258); no satisfactory proof (i. 137); do not use skins of animals nor feathers of birds (i. 138); a girdle of fungus string (i. 138, 142, 380); fringe of leaves suspended from a string (i. 139, 142); necklaces and ligatures of jungle fibre (i. 144, 145); women wear a comb made of bamboo as a charm against diseases (i. 149).

[Pg298] (f). Habitations are rock shelters (i. 173), tree shelters afforded by branches of trees improved by construction of a weather screen (i. 174); ground screen of palm leaves (i. 175).

(g). Hunt successfully the largest animals, escaping easily up the trees (i. 202-204).

(h). Knives made of bamboo, flakes and chips of stone, knives of bone (i. 249, 269); bow and arrow (i. 251, 255); not sufficiently advanced to have produced neolithic implements (i. 268); wooden spear (i. 270).

(i). Ignorant of pottery, vessels made from big stems of bamboo (i. 383).

Social:—

(j). Chief of the group is the principal medicine man, but is on an equal footing with his men, no caste and property is in common (i. 497, 499).

(k). Marriage rights are secured by the presentation of a jungle knife to the bride's parents and a girdle to the bride, and the bride never lets the girdle part from her for fear of its being used to her prejudice in some magic ceremony; adultery is punishable by death (ii. 58, 59) [but this information was not obtained from the most primitive of the Semang people].

(l). Semang women are common to all men (Newbold, Political and Stat. Acc. of Settlements in Straits of Malacca, ii. 379). Great ante-nuptial freedom (ii. 56, 218); "Of the Semang I have not had an opportunity of personally judging" (ii. 377, Newbold).

(m). Eat dead kindred except head (Newbold, ii. 379); burial takes place in the ground, and the older practice [Pg299]was exposure in trees; the Semang have no dread of ghosts of the deceased (ii. 89, 91).

(n). No sacred shrines or places (ii. 197).

(o). Avoidance of mother-in-law (ii. 204).

(p). Myth of the ringdove informing the children of the first woman that they had married within prohibited degrees of consanguinity, and advising them to separate and marry "other people" (ii. 218).

(q). Myth as to ignorance of cause of birth being dispelled by the cocoanut monkey informing the first man and woman (ii. 218).

(r). The Semang are almost ineradicably nomadic, have no fixed habitation, and rove about like the beasts of the forest (i. 172; ii. 470).

(s). Women and girls are not allowed to eat until the men and boys have finished their repast (i. 116); the men do most of the hunting and trapping, and the women take a large share in the collecting of roots and fruits; all the cooking is performed by the women and girls (i. 375).

(t). They are split up into a large number of dialects, each of which is confined to a relatively small area, and it often happens that a little [clan] or even a single family uses a form of speech which is differentiated from other dialects to be practically unintelligible to all except the members of the little community itself (ii. 379).

(u). Natural segregation of the [tribes] into small [clans] to some extent cut off from one another and surrounded by settled Malay communities (ii. 379).

[Pg300] (v). The most thoroughly wild and uncivilised members of our race, regarded by the Malays as little better than brute beasts, with no recorded history (ii. 384).

(w). Nomadic life of the Semang leads them over a considerable tract of country (ii. 388).

Psychical:—

(x). Decorative patterns on quivers representing natural objects, and possessing magical virtue to bring down various species of monkeys and apes and other small mammals (i. 417), and as charms for the men (i. 423).

(y). Decorative pattern on magic comb worn by women to serve as a charm against venomous reptiles and insects, similar design for similar reason sometimes painted on the breast (i. 41, 420-436).

(z). Child's name is taken from some tree which stands near the prospective birthplace of the child. As soon as the child is born this name is shouted aloud by the sage femme, who then hands over the child to another woman, who buries the afterbirth underneath the birth-tree or name-tree of the child. As soon as this is done the father cuts a series of notches in the tree, starting from the ground and terminating at the height of the breast. The cutting of these notches is intended to signalise the arrival on earth of a new human being, since it thus shows that Kari registers the souls that he has sent forth by notching the tree against which he leans. Trees thus "blazed" are never felled. The child must not in later life injure any tree which belongs to the species of his tree; for[Pg301] him all such trees are taboo, and he must not even eat their fruit, the only exception being when an expectant mother revisits her birth-tree. Every tree of its species is regarded as identical with the birth-tree (ii. 3, 4). When an East Semang dies his birth-tree dies too (ii. 5).

(aa). The child's soul is conveyed in a bird, which always inhabits a tree of the species to which the birth-tree belongs. It flies from one tree of the species to another, following the as yet unborn body. The souls of first-born children are always young birds newly hatched, the offspring of the bird which contained the soul of the mother. If the mother does not eat the soul-bird during her accouchement the child will be stillborn or will die shortly after birth (ii. 4, 192, 194, 216). She keeps the soul-bird within the birth-bamboo, and does not eat it all at once, but piecemeal (ii. 6). All human souls grow upon a soul-tree in the other world, whence they are fetched by a bird which was killed and eaten by the expectant mother (ii. 194).

(bb). Semang religion, in spite of its recognition of a thunder-god (Kari) and certain minor deities (so called), has very little indeed in the way of ceremonial, and appears to consist mainly of mythology and legend. It shows remarkably few traces of demon worship, very little fear of ghosts of the deceased, and still less of any sort of animistic beliefs (ii. 174). [As the Kari is the deity common to the Semang and the people higher in culture than the Semang, it is difficult to trace out the primitive idea. The myths also show a common impress, "which is[Pg302] probably mainly due to the same savage Malay element" (ii. 183).]

(cc). During a storm of thunder and lightning the Semang draw a few drops of blood from the region of the shin bone, mix it with a little water in a bamboo receptacle, and throw it up to the angry skies (ii. 204).

(dd). Pretend entire ignorance of a supreme being, but on pressure confessed to a very powerful yet benevolent being, the maker of the world (ii. 209).

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