CHAPTER IV
THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

‘Tue reader need not fear that psychoanalysis,
which first revealed the regular over-determina-
tion of psychie acts and formations, will be
tempted to derive anything so complicated as
religion from a single source. If it necessarily
seeks, as in duty bound, to gain recognition for
one of the sources of this institution, it by no
means claims exclusiveness for this source or
even first rank among the concurring factors.
Only a synthesis from various fields of research
can decide what relative importance in the gene-
sis of religion is to be assigned to the mechanism
which we are to discuss; but such a task
exceeds the means as well as the intentions of
the psychoanalyst.

1

The first chapter of this book made us ac-
quainted with the conception of totemism. We
heard that totemism is a system which takes the

166

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 167

place of religion among certain primitive races
in Australia, America, and Africa, and furnishes
the basis-of social organization. We know that
in 1869 the Scotchman MacLennan attracted
general interest to the phenomena of totemism,
which until then had been considered merely as
curiosities, by his conjecture that a large num-
ber of customs and usages in various old as well
as modern societies were to be taken as remnants
of a totemie epoch. Science has since then
fully recognized this significance of totemism.
I quote a passage from the Elements of the
Psychology of Races by W. Wundt (1912), as
the latest utterance on this question’: ‘ Tak-
ing all this together it becomes highly probable
that a totemic culture was at one time the pre-
liminary stage of every later evolution as well as
a transition stage between the state of primitive
man and the age of gods and heroes.’

It is necessary for the purposes of this chapter
to go more deeply into the nature of totemism.
For reasons that will be evident later I here give
preference to an outline by S. Reinach, who in
the year 1900 sketched the following Code du
Totémisme in twelve articles, like a catechism of
the totemic religion? :

1p, 139,

* Revue Scientifique, October, 1900, reprinted in the four volume
work of the author, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, 1908, Tome 1,
p 1.

168 TOTEM AND TABOO

1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten,
but men bring up individual animals of these
species and take care of them.

2. An animal that dies accidentally is
mourned and buried with the same honours as
a member of the tribe.

8. The prohibition as to eating sometimes
refers only to a certain part of the animal.

4. If pressure of necessity compels the killing
of an animal usually spared, it is done with ex-
cuses to the animal and the attempt is made to
mitigate the violation of the taboo, namely the
killing, through various tricks and evasions.

5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual, it is
solemnly mourned.

6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious.
ceremonies, the skins of certain animals are
donned. Where totemism still exists, these
are totem animals.

7. Tribes and individuals assume the names
of totem animals.

8. Many tribes use pictures of animals as
coats of arms and decorate their weapons with
them ; the men paint animal pictures on their
bodies or have them tattooed.

9. If the totem is one of the feared and
dangerous animals it is assumed that the animal
will spare the members of the tribe named after
it,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 169

10. The totem animal protects and warns the
members of the tribe.

11. The totem animal foretells the future to
those faithful to it and serves as their
leader.

12. The members of a totem tribe often be-
lieve that they are connected with the totem
animal by the bond of common origin.

The value of this catechism of the totem re-
ligion can be more appreciated if one bears in
mind that Reinach has here also incorporated all
the signs and clews which lead to the conclusion
that the totemic system had once existed. The
peculiar attitude of this author to the problem
is shown by the fact that to some extent he neg-
lects the essential traits of totemism, and we
shall see that of the two main tenets of the totem-
istic catechism he has forced one into the back-
ground-and completely lost sight of the other.

In order to get a more correct picture of the
characteristics of totemism we turn to an author
who has devoted four volumes to the theme,
combining the most complete collection of the
observations in question with the most thor-
ough discussion of the problems they raise.
We shall remain indebted to J. G. Frazer, the
author of Totemism and Exogamy*, for the plea-
sure and information he affords, even though

* 1910,

170 TOTEM AND TABOO

psychoanalytic investigation may lead us to
results which differ widely from his *.

“A totem,” wrote Frazer in his first essay °,
“is a class of material objects which a savage re-
gards with superstitious respect, believing that

* But it may bo well to show the reader beforehand how difficult
it is to establish the facts in this field.

In the first place those who collect tho observations aro not
identical with those who digest and discuss them; the first are
travellers and missionaries, while the others are scientific men who
pethaps have never seen the objeots of their research —It is not
easy to establish an understanding with savages. Not all the
observers were familiar with the languages but had to use the
assistance of interpreters or else had to communicate with the
people they questioned in the auxiliary language of pidgin-Eng-
lish, Savages are nob communicative about the most intimate
affairs of their culture and unburden themselves only to those for-
eigners who have passed many years in their midst. From various
motives they often give wrong or misleading information, (Compare
Frazer, The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism Among the Aus-
tralian Aborigines; Fortnighlly Review, 1905; - Totemism and
Ezogamy, Vol. I, p. 150).—It must not be forgotten that primi-
tive races are not young races but really are as old as the most
civilized, and that’ we have no right to expect that they have
preserved their original ideas and institutions for our information
without any evolution or distortion. It is certain, on the con-
trary, that far-reaching changes in all directions have taken place
among primitive races, so that we can never unhesitatingly decide
which of their present conditions and opinions have preserved
the original past, having remained petrified, as it were, and which
represent a distortion and change of the original. It is due to
this that one meets the many disputes among authors as to what
proportion of the peculiarities of a primitive culture is to be taken
as a primary, and what as a later and secondary manifestation.
To establish tho original conditions, therefore, always remains &
matter of construction, Finally, it is not easy to adapt oneself
to the ways of thinking of primitive races, For like children,
we easily misunderstand them, and are always inclined to int
pret their acts and feelings according to our own psychic constella-
tions,

* Totemiam (Edinburgh, 1887), reprinted in the first volume of
his great study, Totemism and Exogamy.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 171

there exists between him and every member of
the elass an intimate and altogether special rela-
tion. The connexion between a person and his
totem is mutually beneficent ; the totem pro-
tects the man and the man shows his respect
for the totem in various ways, by not killing it
if it be an animal, and not cutting or gathering
it if it be a plant. As distinguished from a
fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual
but always a class of objects, generally a species
of animals or of plants, more rarely a class of
inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class
of artificial objects.”

At least three kinds of totem can be distin-
guished :

1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe
shares and which is hereditary from generation
to generation,

2. The sex totem which belongs to all the
masculine or feminine members of a tribe to the
exclusion of the opposite sex, and

3. The individual totem which belongs to the
individual and does not descend to his successors.

The last two kinds of totem are compara-
tively of little importance compared to the tribal
totem. Unless we are mistaken they are recent
formations and of little importance as far as the
nature of the taboo is concerned.

The tribal totem (clan totem) is the object of

ı72 TOTEM AND TABOO

veneration of a group of men and women who
take their name from the totem and consider
themselves consanguineous offspring of a com-
mon ancestor, and who are firmly associated with
each other through common obligations towards
each other as well as by the belief in their
totem.

Totemism is a religious as well as a social
system. On its religious side it consists of the
relations of mutual respect and consideration
between a person and his totem, and on its social
side it is composed of obligations of the mem-
bers of the clan towards each other and towards
other tribes. In the later history of totemism
these two sides show a tendency to part com-
pany; the social system often survives the
religious and conversely remnants of totemism
remain in the religion of countries in which the
social system based upon totemism had dis-
appeared. In the present state of our ignor-
ance about the origin of totemism we cannot say
with certainty how these two sides were origin-
ally combined. But there is on the whole a
strong probability that in the beginning the two
sides of totemism were indistinguishable from
each other. In other words, the further we go
back the clearer it becomes that a member of a
tribe looks upon himself as being of the same
genus as his totem and makes no distinction

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 178

between his attitude towards the totem and his
attitude towards his tribal companions.

In the special description of totemism as a
religious system, Frazer lays stress on the fact
that the members of a tribe assume the name
of their totem and also as a rule believe that they
are descended from it. It is due to this belief
that they do not hunt the totem animal or kill
or eat it, and that they deny themselves every
other use of the totem if it is not an animal.
The prohibitions against killing or cating the
totem are not the only taboos affecting it ; some-
times it is also forbidden to touch it and even to
look at it ; in a number of cases the totem must
not be called by its right name. Violation of
the taboo prohibitions which protect the totem
is punished automatically by serious disease
or death ®.

Speeimens of the totem animals are some-
times raised by the clan and taken care of in
captivity’. A totem animal found dead is
mourned and buried like a member of the clan.
If a totem animal had to be killed it was done
with a prescribed ritual of excuses and ceremon-
ies of expiation.

The tribe expected protection and forbear-
ance from its totem. If it was a dangerous

* Compare the chapter on Taboo.
+ Just as to-day wo still have the wolves in a cage at the steps of
the Capitol in Rome and the bears in the pit at Berne.

174 TOTEM AND TABOO

animal (a beast of prey or a poisonous snake),
it was assumed that it would not harm, and
where this assumption did not come true the
person attacked was expelled from the tribe.
Frazer thinks that oaths were originally ordeals,
many tests as to descent and genuineness being
in this way left to the decision of the totem.
The totem helps in case of illness and gives the
tribe premonitions and warnings. The appear-
ance of the totem animal near a house was often
looked upon as an announcement of death
The totem had come to get its relative *.

A member of a clan seeks to emphasize his
relationship to the totem in various significant
ways; he imitates an exterior similarity by
dressing himself in the skin of the totem animal,
by having the picture of it tattooed upon him-
self, and in other ways. On the solemn occa-
sions of birth, initiation into manhood or funeral
obsequies this identification with the totem is
carried out in deeds and words. Dances in
which all the members of the tribe disguise
themselves as their totem and act like it, serve
various magic and religious purposes. Finally
there are the ceremonies at which the totem
animal is killed in a solemn manner *.

The social side of totemism is primarily ex-

% Like the legend of the white woman in many noble families.
* lex p. 35.—Seo the discussion of sacrifice further on.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 175

pressed in a sternly observed commandment
and in a tremendous restriction. The members
of a totem clan are brothers and sisters, pledged
to help and protect each other; if a member
of the clan is slain by a stranger the whole tribe
of the slayer must answer for the murder and
the clan of the slain man shows its solidarity
in the demand for expiation for the blood that
has been shed. The ties of the totem are
stronger than our ideas of family ties, with
which they do not altogether coincide, since
the transfer of the totem takes. place as a rule
through maternal inheritance, paternal inherit-
ance possibly not counting at all in the begin-
ning.

But the corresponding taboo restriction con-
sists in the prohibition against members of the
same clan marrying each other or having any
kind of sexual intercourse whatsoever with each
other. This is the famous and enigmatic
exogamy connexion with totemism. We have
devoted the whole first chapter of this book to
it, and therefore need only mention here that
this exogamy springs from the intensified incest.
dread of primitive races, that it becomes en-
tirely comprehensible as a security against
incest in group marriages, and that at first it
accomplishes the avoidance of incest for the
younger generation and only in the course of

176 TOTEM AND TABOO

further development becomes a hindrance to
the older generation as well‘,

To this presentation of totemism by Frazer,
one of the earliest in the literature on the sub-
ject, I will now add a few excerpts from one of
the latest summaries. In the Elements of the
Psychology of Races, which appeared in 1912,
W. Wundt says"; “‘ The totem animal is con-
sidered the ancestral animal. ‘Totem’ is
therefore both a group name and a birth name
and in the latter aspect this name has at the
same time a mythological meaning. But all
these uses of the conception play into each other
and the particular meanings may recede so that
in some cases the totems have become almost a
mere nomenclature of the tribal divisions, while
in others the idea of the descent or else the
cultic meaning of the totem remains in the fore-
ground. ... The conception of the totem de-
termines the tribal arrangement and the tribal
organization. These norms and their establish-
ment in the belief and feelings of the members
of the tribe account for the fact that originally
the totem animal was certainly not considered
merely a name for a group division but that it
usually was considered the progenitor of the cor-
responding division. ... This accounted for

1° Sco Chapter I.
Mp, 116.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 177

the fact that these animal ancestors enjoyed
a cult. ... This animal cult expresses itself
primarily in the attitude towards the totem ani-
mal, quite aside from special ceremonies and
ceremonial festivities : not only each individual
animal but every representative of the same
species was to a certain degree a sanctified ani-
mal ; the member of the totem was forbidden to
cat the flesh of the totem animal or he was al-
lowed to eat it only under special circumstances.
This is in accord with the significant contra-
dictory phenomenon found in this connexion,
namcely, that under certain conditions there was
a kind of ceremonial consumption of the totem
flesh: 2,5%

“. . . But the most important social side of
this totemic tribal arrangement consists in the
fact that it was connected with certain rules of
conduct for the relations of the groups with each
other. The most important of these were the
tules of conjugal relations. This tribal di-
vision is thus connected with an important phe-
nomenon which first made its appearance in the
totemic age, namely with exogamy.”

If we wish to arrive at the characteristics of
the original totemism by sifting through every-
thing that may correspond to later development.
or decline, we find the following essential facts :
The totems were originally only animals and

N

178 TOTEM AND TABOO

were considered the ancestors of single tribes.
The totem was hereditary only through the
female line ; it was forbidden to kill the totem
(or to eat it, which under primitive conditions
amounts to the same thing) ; members of a totem
were forbidden to have sexual intercourse with
each other",

It may now seem strange to us that in the
Code du totemisme which Reinach has drawn up_
the one principal taboo, namely exogamy, does
not appear at all while the assumption of the
second taboo, namely the descent from the to-
tem animal, is only casually mentioned. Yet
Reinach is an author to whose work in this field
we owe much and I have chosen his presentation
in order to prepare us for the differences of
opinion among the authors, which will now
occupy our attention.

% The conclusion which Frazer draws about totemism in his
second work on the subject (The Origin of Totemism ; Fortnightly
Review, 1899) agrees with this text: “Thus, totemism has com-
monly been treated as a primitive system both of religion and
of society. As a system of religion it embraces the mystic union
cof the savage with his totem ; as a system of society it comprises
the relations in which men and women of the same totem stand to
each other and to the members of other totemic groups. And

ing to these two sides of the system are two rough-and-
ready tests or canons of totemism ; first, the rule that a man may
not kill or eat his totem animal or plant, and second, the rule that
he may not marry or cohabit with a woman of the same totem”
(p. 101). Frazer then adds something which takes us into the
midst of the discussion about totemism: ‘Whether the two sides

—the religious and the social—have always coexisted or are essen-
tially independent, is a question which has been variously answered.”

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 179

2

The more convinced we became that totemism
had regularly formed a phase of every culture,
the more urgent became the necessity of arriv-
ing at an understanding of it and of casting light
upon the riddle of its nature. To be sure,
everything about totemism is in the nature of
a riddle; the decisive questions are the origin .
of the totem, the motivation of exogamy (or
rather of the incest taboo which it represents)
and the relation between the two, the totem
organization and the incest prohibition. The
understanding should be at once historical and
psychological ; it should inform us under what
conditions this peculiar institution developed
and to what psychic needs of man it has given
expression.

The reader will certainly be astonished to
hear from how many different points of view
the answer to these questions has been attempted
and how far the opinions of expert investigators
vary. Almost everything that might be asserted
in general about totemism is doubtful; even
the above statement of it, taken from an article
by Frazer in 1887, cannot escape the criticism
that it expresses an arbitrary preference of the
author and would be challenged to-day by

180 TOTEM AND TABOO

Frazer himself, who has repeatedly changed his
view on the subject *.

It is quite obvious that the nature of totem-
ism and exogamy could be most readily grasped
if we could get into closer touch with the origin
of both institutions. But in judging the state
of affairs we must not forget the remark of An-
drew Lang, that even primitive races have not
preserved these original forms and the condi-
tions of their origin, so that we are altogether
dependent upon hypotheses to take the place
of the observation we lack!*. Among the
attempted explanations some seem inadequate
from the very beginning in the judgment of the
psychologist. They are altogether too rational
and do not take into consideration the effective
character of what they are to explain. Others
rest on assumptions which observation fails to
verify ; while still others appeal to facts which
could better be subjected to another in-
terpretation. The refutation of these various

» Tn connexion with such a change of opinion Frazer made this
excellent statement : “‘That my conclusions on these difficult. ques-
tions are final, I am not so foolish as to pretend. I have changed
my views repeatedly, and I am resolved to change them again with
‘every change of the evidence, for like a chameleon the inquirer
should shift his colours with the shifting colours of the ground he
treads.” Preface to Vol. I, Totemism and Exogamy, 1910.

34 “By the nature of the case, as the origin of totemism lies far
beyond our powers of historical examination or of experiment, we
‘must have recourse as regards this matter, to conjecture,” Andrew
Lang, Secret of the Totem, p. 27.“ Nowhere do we see absolutely
primitive man, and a totemie system in the making,” p. 29.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 181

opinions as a rule hardly presents any difficul-
ties ; the authors are, as usual, stronger in the
criticism which they practice on each other than
in their own work. The final result as regards
most of the points treated is a non liquet. It is
therefore not surprising that most of the new
literature on the subject, which we have largely
omitted here, shows the unmistakable effort
to reject a general solution of totemie problems
as unfeasible. (See, for instance, B. Golden-
weiser in the‘Journal of American Folklore xxuut,
1910. Reviewed in the Brittanica Year Book,
1918.) Thave taken the liberty of disregarding
the chronological order in stating these contra~
dictory hypotheses.

(a) Tue Onrern or Toremism

The question of the origin of totemism can
also be formulated as follows : How did primi-
tive people come to select the names of animals,
plants and inanimate objects for themselves and.
their tribes ?*

The Scotchman, MacLennan, who discovered
totemism and exogamy for science ™, refrained
from publishing his views of the origin of totem-
ism. According toa communication of Andrew

35 Ab first probably only animals,

1° The Worship of Animals and Plants (Fortnighily Review,
1869-1870). Primitive Marriage, 1865; both works reprinted in
Studies in Ancient History, 1876 ; socond edition, 1886,

182 TOTEM AND TABOO

Lang ™ he was for a time inclined to trace totem-
ism back to the custom of tattooing. I shall
divide the accepted theories of the derivation
of totemism into three groups, (a) nominalistic,
(8) sociological, (y) psychological.

(a) The Nominalistic Theories

The information about these theories will
justify their summation under the headings I
have used.

Garcilaso de La Vega, a descendant of the
Peruvian Inkas, who wrote the history of his
race in the seventeenth century, is already said
to have traced back what was known to him
about totemic phenomena to the need of the
tribes to differentiate themselyes from each
other by means of names*. ‘The same idea
appears centuries later in the Ethnology of A. K.
Keane where totems are said to be derived from
heraldic badges through which individuals,
families and tribes wanted to differentiate
themselves 1°,

Max Miiller expresses the same opinion about
the meaning of the totem in his Contributions to
the Science of Mythology**. A totem is said to
be, 1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name, 8. the

41 The Secret of the Totem, 1905, p. 34.
38 Thid.
19 Ibid.

= % According to Andrew Lang,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 183

name of the ancestor of the clan, 4. the name of
the object which the clan reveres. J. Pikler
wrote later, in 1899, that men needed a perma-
nent name for communities and individuals
that could be preserved in writing, . Thus
totemism arises, not from a religious, but from a
prosaic everyday need of mankind. The giving
of names, which is the essence of totemism, is
a result of the technique of primitive writing.
The totem is of the nature of an easily repre-
sented writing symbol. But if savages first
bore the name of an animal they deduced the
idea of relationship from this animal ®,

Herbert Spencer“, also, thought that the
origin of totemism was to be found in the giving
ofnames. The attributes of certain individuals,
he showed, had brought about their being
named after animals so that they had come to
have names of honour or nicknames which con-
tinued in their descendants. As a result of the
indefiniteness and incomprehensibility of primi-
tive languages, these names are said to have been
taken by later generations as proof of their de-
scent from the animals themselves. Totemism
would thus be the result of a mistaken reverence
for ancestors.

% Pikler and Somlé, The Origin of Totemism, 1901. The au-
thors rightly call their attempt at explanation a “Contribution to
the materialistic theory of History.”

% The Origin of Animal Worship (Fortnightly Review, 1870).
Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, §§ 169 to 176,

184 TOTEM AND TABOO

Lord Avebury (better known under his for-
mer name, Sir John Lubbock) has expressed
himself quite similarly about the origin of
totemism, though without emphasizing the mis-
understanding. If we want to explain the
veneration of animals we must not forget how
often human names are borrowed from animals.
The children and followers of a man who was
called bear or lion naturally made this their
ancestralname. In this way it came about that
the animal itself came to be respected and
finally vencrated.

Fison has advanced what scems an irrefutable
objection to such a derivation of the totem
name from the names of individuals®. He
shows from conditions in Australia that the
totem is always the mark of a group of people
and never ofan individual. But ifit were other-
wise, if the totem was originally the name of a
single individual, it could never, with the
system of maternal inheritance, descend to his
children.

The theories thus far stated are evidently
inadequate. They may explain how animal
names came to be applied to primitive tribes but
they can never explain the importance attached
to the giving of names which constitutes the

"= Kamilaroi and Kurmai, p, 165, 1880 (Lang, Seoret of the Totem,
ste).

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 185

totemic system. The most noteworthy theory of
this group has been developed by Andrew Lang
in his books, Social Origins, 1908, and The
Secret of the Totem, 1905. This theory still
makes naming the centre of the problem, but it
uses two interesting psychological factors and
thus may claim to have contributed to the final
solution of the riddle of totemism.

Andrew Lang holds that it does not make any
difference how clans acquired their animal
names. It might be assumed that one day they
awoke to the consciousness that they had them
without being able to account from where they
came. The origin of these names had been. for-
gotten. In that case they would seek to acquire
more information by pondering over their
names, and with their conviction of the impor-
tance of names they necessarily came to all the
ideas that are contained in the totemic system.
For primitive men, as for savages of to-day and
even for our children ®*, a name is not indifferent
and conventional as it seems to us, but is some-
thing important and essential. A man’s name
is one of the main constituents of his person and
perhaps a part of his psyche. ‘The fact that they
had the same names as animals must have led
primitive men to assume a seeret and ‘mportant
bond between their persons and the particular

¥ See the chapter on Taboo, p. 96.

186 TOTEM AND TABOO

animal species. What other bond than consan-
guinity could it be? But if the similarity of
names once led to this assumption it could also
account directly for all the totemic prohibitions
of the blood taboo, including exogamy.

“No more than these three things—a group
animal name of unknown origin; belief in a
transcendental connexion between all bearers,
human and bestial, of the same name; and
belief in the blood superstitions—were needed to
give rise to all the totemie ereeds and practices,
including exogamy” (Secret of the Totem, p.
126).

Lang’s explanation extends over two periods.
It derives the totemic system of psychological
necessity from the totem names, on the assump-
tion that the origin of the naming has been for-
gotten. The other part of the theory now seeks
to clear up the origin of these names. We shall
see that it bears an entirely different stamp.

This other part of the Lang theory is not
markedly different from those which I have
called ‘nominalistic’. The practical need of
differentiation compelled the individual tribes
to assume names and therefore they tolerated
the names which every tribe ascribed to the
other. This ‘naming from without’ is the
peculiarity of Lang’s construction. The fact
that the names which thus originated were

IN

‘ANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 187

borrowed from animals is not further remarkable
and need not have been felt by primitive men as
abuse or derision. Besides, Lang has cited
numerous cases from later epochs of history in
which names given from without that were first
meant to be derisive were accepted by those
nicknamed and voluntarily borne (The Guises,
Whigs and Tories). The assumption that the
origin of these names was forgotten in the course
“of time connects this second part of the Lang
theory with the first one just mentioned.

(8) The Sociological Theories

S. Reinach, who successfully traced the relics
of the totemic system in the cult and customs of
later periods, though attaching from the very
beginning only slight value to the factor of
descent from the totem animal, once made the
casual remark that totemism seemed to him to
be nothing but “ une hypertrophie de Vinstinct
social.” #6

‘The same interpretation seems to permeate
the new work of E. Durkheim, Les Formes
Elémentaires de la Vie Religieuse ; Le Systéme
Totémique en Australie, 1912. The totem is the
visible representative of the social religion of
these races. It embodies the community,
which is the real object of veneration.

* Le, Vol. I, p. 41.

188 TOTEM AND TABOO

Other authors have sought a more intimate
reason for the share which social impulses have
played in the formation of totemie institutions.
Thus A. C. Haddon has assumed that every
primitive tribe originally lived on a particular
plant or animal species and perhaps also traded
with this food and exchanged it with other
tribes. It then was inevitable that a tribe
should become*known to other tribes by the
name of the animal which played such weighty
role with it. At the same time this tribe would
develop a special familiarity with this animal,
and a kind of interest for it which, however, was
based upon the psychic motive of man’s most
elementary and pressing need, namely, hun-
ger.

The objections against this most rational of
all the totem theories are that such a state of the
food supply is never found among primitive men
and probably never existed. Savages are the
more omnivorous the lower they stand in the
social scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how
such an exclusive dict could have developed an
almost religious relation to the totem, culminat-
ing in an absolute abstention from the referred
food.

The first of the three theories about the origin

1% Addrese to the Anthropological Section, British Association,
Belfast, 1902. According to Frazer, l.c., Vol. IV, p. 50.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 189

of totemism which Frazer stated was a psycho-
logical one. We shall report it elsewhere.

Frazer’s second theory, which we will discuss
here, originated under the influence of an im-
portant publication by two investigators of the
inhabitants of Central Australia >’.

Spencer and Gillen describe a series of pe-
culiar institutions, customs, and opinions of a
group of tribes, the so-called Arunta nation, and
Frazer subscribes to their opinion that these
peculiarities are to be looked upon as character-
istics of a primary state and that they can ex-
plain the first and real meaning of totemism.

In the Arunta tribe itself (a part of the
Arunta nation) these peculiarities are as fol-
lows :

1. They have the division into totem clans
but the totem is not hereditary but is individu-
ally determined (as will be shown later).

2. The totem clans are not exogamous, and
the marriage restrictions are brought about by
a highly developed division into marriage
classes which have nothing to do with the
totems.

8. The function of the totem clan consists of
carrying out a ceremony which in a subtle magic
manner brings about an increase of the edible

% The Native Tribes of Central Australia, by Baldwin Spencer
and H. J. Gillen, London, 1891.

i90 TOTEM AND TABOO

totem. (This ceremony is called Intichiwma.)

4. The Aruntas have a peculiar theory about
conception and re-birth. They assume that the
spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem
wait for their re-birth in definite localities and
penetrate into the bodies of the women who pass
such a spot. When a child is born the mother
states at which spirit abode she thinks she con-
ceived her child. This determines the totem
of the child. It is further assumed that the
spirits (of the dead as well as of the re-born) are
bound to peculiar stone amulets, called Churinga,
which are found in these places.

Two factors seem to have induced Frazer to
believe that the oldest form of totemism had
been found in the institution of the Aruntas.
In the first place the existence of certain myths
which assert that the ancestors of the Aruntas
always lived on their totem animal, and that
they marricd no other women except those of
their own totem. Secondly, the apparent dis-
regard of the sexual act in their theory of con-
ception. People who have not yet realized that
conception was the result of the sexual act
might well be considered the most backward
and primitive people living to-day.

Frazer, in having recourse to the Intichiwma
ceremony to explain totemism, suddenly saw
the totemic system in a totally different light as

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 191

a thoroughly practical organization for accom-
plishing the most natural needs of man. (Com-
pare Haddon above**.) ‘The system was simply
an extraordinary piece of ‘ co-operative magic ’.
Primitive men formed what might be called
a magic production and consumption club.
Each totem clan undertook to see to the cleanli-
ness of a certain article of food. If it were a
question of inedible totems like harmful animals,
rain, wind, or similar objects, it was the duty of
the totem clan to dominate this part of nature
and to ward off its injuriousness. ‘The cfforts of
each clan were for the good of all the others.
As the clan could not eat its totem or could eat
only a very little of it, it furnished this valuable
product for the rest and was in turn furnished
with what these had to take care of as their social
totem duty. In the light of this interpretation
furnished by the Intichiuma ceremony, it
appeared to Frazer as if the prohibition against
eating the totem had misled observers to neglect
the more important side of the relation, namely
the commandment to supply as much as possi-
ble of the edible totem for the needs of others.

Frazer accepted the tradition of the Aruntas

%® There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that
metaphysical haze which some writers love to conjure up over the
humblest beginnings of human speculation but which is utterly

foreign to the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes of the savage.
(Totemism and Ezogamy, 1, p. 117.)

192 TOTEM AND TABOO

that each totem clan had originally lived on its
totem without any restriction. It then became
difficult to understand the evolution that fol-
lowed through which savages were satisfied to
ensure the totem for others while they them-
selves abstained from eating it. He then
assumed that this restriction was by no means
the result of a kind of religious respect, but came
about through the observation that no animal
devoured its own kind, so that this break in the
identification with the totem was injurious to
the power which savages sought to acquire over
the totem. Or else it resulted from the endeav-
our to make the being favourably disposed by
sparingit. Frazer did not conceal the difficulties
of this explanation from himself **, nor did he
dare to indicate in what way the habit of
marrying within the totem, which the myths of
the Aruntas proclaimed, was converted into
exogamy.

Frazer’s theory based on the Intichiuma,
stands or falls with the recognition of the
primitive nature of the Arunta institutions.
But it seems impossible to hold to this in the fact
of the objections advanced by Durkheim *° and
Lang*!. The Aruntas seem on the contrary to

»

a ‘Sociologique, Vol. T, V, VILL, and elsewhere. See

especially the chapter, Sur le Totémisme, Vol. V, 1901.
# Social Origins and the Secret of the Totem.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 198.

be the most developed of the Australian tribes
and to represent rather a dissolution stage of
totemism than its beginning. The myths that
made such an impression on Frazer because they
emphasize, in contrast to prevailing institutions
of to-day, that the Aruntas are free to eat the
totem and to marry within it, easily explain
themselves to us as wish phantasies, which are
projected into the past, like the myths of the
Golden Age.

(y) The Psychological Theories

Frazer's first psychological theories, formed
before his acquaintance with the observations of
Spencer and Gillen, were based upon the belief
in an ‘ outward soul ’**. The totem was meant
to represent a safe place of refuge where the
soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers
which threaten it. After primitive man had
housed his soul in his totem he himself became
invulnerable and he naturally took care himself
not to harm the bearer of his soul. But as he
did not know which individual of the species in
question was the bearer of his soul he was con-
cerned in sparing the whole species. Frazer
himself later gave up this derivation of totem-
ism from the belief in souls.

When he became acquainted with the obser-

% The Golden Bough, U, p. 332.
°

194 TOTEM AND TABOO

vations of Spencer and Gillen he set up the other
social theory which has just been stated, but he
himself then saw that the motive from which he
had derived totemism was altogether too ‘ ra-
tional ’ and that he had assumed a social organi-
zation for it which was altogether too com-
plicated to be called primitive*. The magic
co-operative companies now appeared to him
rather as the fruit than as the germ of totemism.
He sought a simpler factor for the derivation of
totemism in the shape of a primitive supersti-
tion behind these forms. He then found this
original factor in the remarkable conception
theory of the Aruntas.

As already stated, the Aruntas establish no
connexion between conception and the sexual
act. Ifa woman feels herself to be a mother it
means that at that moment one of the spirits
from the nearest spirit abode who has been
watching for a re-birth, has penetrated into her
body and is born as her child. This child has
the same totem as all the spirits that lurk in that
particular locality. But if we are willing to go
back a step further and assume that the woman
originally believed that the animal, plant, stone,

* “Tt is unlikely that a community of savages should deliber-
ately parcel out the realm of nature into provinces, assign each
province toa particular band of magicians, and bid all the bands

to work their magic and weave their spells for the common good.”
Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. 1V, p. 57.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 195

or other object which occupied her fancy at the
moment when she first felt herself pregnant had.
really penetrated into her and was being born
through her in human form, then the identity
of a human being with his totem would really
be founded on the belief of the mother, and all
the other totem commandments (with the ex-
ception of exogamy) could easily be derived
from this belief. Men would refuse to cat the
particular animal or plant because it would be
just like eating themselves. But occasionally
they would be impelled to eat some of their
totem in a ceremonial manner because they
could thus strengthen their identification with
the totem, which is the essential part of totem-
ism. W. H.R. Rivers’ observations among the
inhabitants of the Bank Islands seemed to prove
men’s direct identification with their totems on
the basis of such a conception theory **.

The ultimate sources of totemism would then
be the ignorance of savages as to the process of
procreation among human beings and animals ;
especially their ignorance as to the réle which
the male plays in fertilization. This ignorance
must be facilitated by the long interval which
is interposed between the fertilizing act and the
birth of the child or the sensation of the child’s
first movements, 'Totemism is therefore a crea-

* Totemism and Ezogamy, Vol. 1, p. 80, and IV, p. 59,

196 TOTEM AND TABOO

tion of the feminine mind and not of the mascu-
line. The sick fancies of the pregnant woman
are the roots of it. Anything indeed that
struck a woman at that mysterious moment
of her life when she first knows herself to be
a mother might easily be identified by her with
the child inher womb. Such maternal fancies,
so natural and seemingly so universal, appear
to be the root of totemism**.

The main objection to this third theory of
Frazer’s is the same which has already been ad-
vanced against his second, sociological theory.
The Aruntas seem to be far removed from the
beginnings of totemism. Their denial of father-
hood does not apparently rest upon primitive
ignorance ; in many cases they even have pater-
nal inheritance. They seem to have sacrificed
fatherhood to a kind of a speculation which
strives to honour the ancestral spirits **.
Though they raise the myth of immaculate con-
ception through a spirit to a general theory of
conception, we cannot for that reason credit
them with ignorance as to the conditions of pro-
creation any more than we could the old races
who lived during the rise of the Christian myths.

Another psychological theory of the origin of

% Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 63.
8 “That belief is a philosophy far from primitive”, Andrew

Lang, Socret of the Totem, p, 102.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 197

totemism has been formulated by the Dutch
writer, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a con-
nexion between totemism and the migration of
souls. ‘‘ The animal into which, according to
general belief, the souls of the dead passed, be-.
came a blood relative, an ancestor, and was
revered as such.” But the belief in the soul’s
migration to animals is more readily derived
from totemism than inversely ®.

Still another theory of totemism is advanced
by the excellent American ethnologists, Franz
Boas, Hill-Tout, and others. It is based on
observations of totemie Indian tribes and
asserts that thetotem is-originally the guardian
spirit of an ancestor who has acquired it through
a dream and handed it on to his descendants.
We have already heard the diffieulties which the
derivation of totemism through inheritance
from a single individual offers; besides, the
Australian observations seem by no means to
support the tracing back of the totem to the
guardian spirit**.

“Two facts have become decisive for the last of
the psychological theories as stated by Wundt ;
in the first place, that the original and most
widely known totem object was an animal,
and secondly, that the earliest totem animals

% Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 45.
28 Frazer, Le, p. 48,

198 TOTEM AND TABOO

corresponded to animals which had a soul**.
Such animals as birds, snakes, lizards, mice
are fitted by their extreme mobility, their
flight through the air, and by other character-
istics which arouse surprise and fear, to become
the bearers of souls which leave their bodies.
The totem animal is a descendant of the animal
transformations of the spirit-soul. Thus with
Wundt totemism is directly connected with the
belief in souls or with animism.

(b) and (c) Tue Orıcın or Exocamy anp Its
RELATION To ToTEMISM

I have put forth the theories of totemism
with considerable detail and yet I am afraid
that I have not made them clear enough on
account of the condensation that was constantly
necessary. In the interest of the reader I am
taking the liberty of further condensing the
other questions that arise. The discussions
about the exogamy of totem races become
especially complicated and untractable, onc
might even say confused, on account of the
nature of the material used. Fortunately the
object of this treatise permits me to limit
myself to pointing out several guide-posts and
referring to the frequently quoted writings of

% Wundt, Elemente der Vöker-Psychologie, p. 190.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 199

experts in the field for a more thorough pursuit
of the subject.

The attitude of an author to the problems of
exogamy is of course not independent of the
stand he has taken toward one or the other of
the totem theories. Some of these explana-
tions of totemism lack all connexion with exo-
gamy so that the two institutions are entirely
separated. Thus we find here two opposing
views, one of which clings to the original likeli-
hood that exogamy is an essential part of the
totemie system while the other disputes such a
connection and believes in an accidental com-
bination of these two traits of the most ancient
cultures. Inhis later works Frazerhasemphatic-
ally stood for this latter point of view.

“ Imust request the reader to bear constantly
in mind that the two institutions of totemism
and exogamy are fundamentally distinet in
origin and nature though they have aceidentally
crossed and blended in many tribes.” (Totem-
ism and Exogamy I, Preface XII.)

He warns directly against the opposite view
as being a source of endless difficulties and mis-
understandings. In contrast to this, many au-
thors have found a way of conceiving exogamy
as a necessary consequence of the basic views on
totemism. Durkheim *° has shown in his writ-

«© LJannée Sociologique, 1898-1904,

200 TOTEM AND TABOO

ings how the taboo, which is attached to the
totem, must have entailed the prohibition
against putting a woman of the same totem to
sexual uses. The totem is of the same blood as
the human being and for this reason the blood
bann (in reference to defloration and menstrua-
tion) forbids sexual intercourse with a woman of
the same totem#. Andrew Lang, who here
agrees with Durkheim, goes so far as to believe
that the blood taboo was not necessary to bring
about the prohibition in regard to the women
of the same tribe *. The general totem taboo
which, for instance, forbids any one to sit in
the shadow of the totem tree, would have
sufficed. Andrew Lang also contends for an-
other derivation of exogamy (see below) and
leaves it in doubt how these two explanations are
related to each other.

As regards the temporal relations, the ma-
jority of authors subscribe to the opinion that
totemism is the older institution and that ex-
ogamy came later *,

Among the theories which seek to explain
exogamy independently of totemism only a few
need be mentioned in so far as they illustrate

© See Frazer's Criticiam of Durkheim, Totemism and Exog-
amy, p. 101.

8 Secret, ete., p. 125,

«3 Seo Frazer, Le., Vol. IV, p. 75: “The totemic clan is a totally
different social organism from tho exogamous class, and we have
good grounds for thinking that it is far older.”

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 201

different attitudes of the authors towards the
problem of incest.

MacLennan * had ingeniously guessed that
exogamy resulted from the remnants of customs
pointing to carlier forms of female rape. He
assumed that it was the general custom in an-
cient times to procure women from strange
tribes so that marriage with a woman from the
same tribe gradually became “improper be-
causc it was unusual’. He sought the motive
for the exogamous habit in the scarcity of
women among these tribes, which had resulted
from the custom of killing most female children
at birth, We are not concerned here with
investigation whether actual conditions corro-
borate MacLennan’s assumptions. We are
more interested in the argument that these
premises still leave it unexplained why the male
members of the tribe should have made these
few women of their blood inaccessible to them-
selves, as well as in the manner in which the
incest problem is here entirely neglected **,

Other writers have on the contrary assumed,
and evidently with more right, that exogamy
is to be interpreted as an institution for the
prevention of incest **.

Tf we survey the gradually increasing compli-

«* Primitive. Marriage, 1865,
“8 Frazer, be., p. 73 to 9.
“© Compare Chapter 1,

202 TOTEM AND TABOO

cation of Australian marriage restrictions we
ean hardly help agreeing with the opinion of
Morgan Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer ®,
that these institutions bear the stamp of ‘ delib-
erate design ’, as Frazer puts it, and that they
were meant to do what they have actually
accomplished. ‘‘ In no other way does it seem
possible to explain in all its details a system at
once so complex and so regular” *.

It is of interest to point out that the first re-
strictions which the introduction of marriage
classes brought about affected the sexual free-
dom of the younger generation, in other words,
incest between brothers and sisters and between
sons and mothers, while incest between father
and daughter was only abrogated by more
sweeping measures.

However, to trace back exogamous sexual
restrictions to legal intentions does not add any-
thing to the understanding of the motive which
created these institutions. From what source,
in the final analysis, springs the dread of incest
which must be recognized as the root of exo-
gamy ? It evidently does not suffice to appeal
to an instinctive aversion against sexual inter-
course with blood relatives, that is to say, to the
fact of incest dread, in order to explain the

42 Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877.—Frazer, Totemism and Rzogamyı

Vol. IV, p. 105.
# Frazer, Le, p. 106,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 203

dread of incest, if social experience shows that,
in spite of this instinct, incest is not a rare
occurrence even in our society, and if the experi-
ence of history can acquaint us with cases in
which incestuous marriage of privileged persons
was made the rule.

Westermarck * advanced the following to ex-
plain the dread of incest : “‘ that an innate aver-
sion against sexual intercourse exists between
persons who live together from childhood and
that this feeling, since such persons are as a rule
consanguineous, finds a natural expression in
custom and law through the abhorrence of sex-
ual intercourse between those closely related.”
Though Havelock Ellis disputed the instinctive
character of this aversion in the Studies in the
Psychology of Sex, he otherwise supported the
same explanation in its essentials by declaring :
“The normal absence of the manifestation of
the pairing instinct where brothers and sisters
or boys and girls living together from childhood
are concerned, is a purely negative phenomenon
due to the fact that under these circumstances
the antecedent conditions for arousing the
mating instinct must be entirely lacking. . . .
For persons who have grown up together from
childhood habit has dulled the sensual attrac-

9 Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions, Vol, TL: Marriage
(1909), ‘See also there the author's defence against familiar objec
tions, - =

204 TOTEM AND TABOO

tion of seeing, hearing and touching and has led
it into a channel of quiet attachment, robbing
it of its power to call forth the necessary ere-
thistie exeitement required to produce sexual
tumescence.”

It seems to me very remarkable that Wester-
marck looks upon this innate aversion to sexual
intercourse with persons with whom we have
shared childhood as being at the same time a
psychic representative of the biological fact that
inbreeding means injury to the species. Such
a biological instinct would hardly go so far astray
in its psychological manifestation as to affect
the companions of home and hearth which in
this respect are quite harmless, instead of the
blood relatives which alone are injurious to

- procreation. And I cannot resist citing the
excellent criticism which Frazer opposes to
Westermarck’s assertion. Frazer finds it in-
comprehensible that sexual sensibility to-day is
not at all opposed to sexual intercourse with
companions of the hearth and home while the
dread of incest, which is said to be nothing but
an offshoot of this reluctance, has nowadays
grown to be so overpowering. But other re-
marks of Frazer’s go deeper and I set them
down here in unabbreviated form because they
are in essential agreement with the arguments
developed in my chapter on taboo,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 205

“Tt is not easy to see why any deep human
instinct should need reinforcement through law.
There is no law commanding men to eat and
drink, or forbidding them to put their hands in
the fire. Men eat and drink and keep their
hands out of the fire instinctively, for fear of
natural, not legal penalties, which would be en-
tailed by violence done to these instincts. The
law only forbids men to do what their instincts
incline them to do ; what nature itself prohibits
and punishes it would be superfluous for the law
to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may
always safely assume that crimes forbidden by
law are crimes which many men have a natural
propensity to commit. If there were no such
propensity there would be no such erimes, and
if no such crimes were committed, what need to
forbid them? Instead of assuming therefore,
from the legal prohibition of incest, that there is
a natural aversion to ineest we ought rather to
assume that there is a natural instinct in favour
of it, and that if the law represses it, it does so
because civilized men have come to the conclu-
sion that the satisfaction of these natural in-
stincts is detrimental to the general interests.
of society ” 5%,

To this valuable argument of Frazer’s I can
add that the experiences of psychoanalysis make

% Le, p. 97.

206 TOTEM AND TABOO

the assumption of such an innate aversion to in-
cestuous relations altogether impossible. They
have taught, on the contrary, that the first sexual
impulses of the young are regularly of an incest-
uous nature and that such repressed impulses
play a réle which can hardly be overestimated
as the motive power of later neuroses.

The interpretation of incest dread as an in-
nate instinct must therefore be abandoned. The
same holds true of another derivation of the in-
cest prohibition which counts many supporters,
namely, theassumption that primitive races very
soon observed the dangers with which inbreed-
ing threatened their race and that they therefore
had decreed the incest prohibition with a con-
scious purpose. The objections to this at-
tempted explanation crowd upon each other *.
Not only must the prohibition of incest be older
than all breeding of domesticanimals from which
men could derive experience of the effect of in-
breeding upon the characteristics of the breed,
but the harmful consequences of inbreeding are
not established beyond all doubt even to-day
and in man they can be shown only with diffi-
culty. Besides, everything that we know about
contemporaneous savages makes it very improb-
able that the thoughts of their far-removed

5 Compare Durkheim, La Prohibition de U'Inceste (Liannée
Soviologique, I, 1896-7).

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 207

ancestors should already have been occupied
with preventing injury to their later descen-
dants. It sounds almost ridiculous to attribute
hygienic and cugenic motives such as have
hardly yet found consideration in our culture,
to these children of the race who lived without
thought of the morrow ™.

And finally it must be pointed out that a pro-
hibition against inbreeding as an element weak-
eningto therace, which is imposed from practical
hygienic motives, seems quite inadequate to
explain the deep abhorrence which our society
feels against incest. ‘This dread of incest, as I
have shown elsewhere ®, seems to be even more
active and stronger among primitive races living
to-day than among the civilized.

In inquiring into the origin of incest dread it
could be expected that here also there is the
choice between possible explanations of a socio-
logical, biological, and psychological nature in
which the psychological motives might have to
be considered as representative of biological
forces. Still, in the end, one is compelled to
subscribe to Frazer’sresigned statement, namely,
that we do not know the origin of incest dread
and do not even know how to guess at it. None

#2 Charles Darwin says about savages : “They are not likely to
reflect on distant evils to their pomay

See Chapter I,

208 TOTEM AND TABOO

of the solutions of the riddle thus far advanced
seems satisfactory to us *.

I must mention another attempt to explain
the origin of incest dread which is of an entirely
different nature from those considered up to
now. It might be called an historic explanation.

This attempt is associated with a hypothesis
of Charles Darwin about the primal social state
of man. From the habits of the higher apes
Darwin concluded that man, too, lived originally

_ in small hordes in which the jealousy of the old-
est and strongest male prevented sexual promis-
cuity. “ We may indeed conclude from what
we know of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds,
armed, as many of them are, with special wea-
pons for battling with their rivals, that pro-
miscuous intercourse in a state of nature is
extremely improbable. . . . If we therefore look
back far enough into the stream of time and
judging from the social habits of man as he now
exists, the most probable view is that he origin-
ally lived in small communities, each with a
single wife, or if powerful with several, whom he
jealously defended against all other men. Or
he may not have been a social animal and yet
have lived with several wives, like the gorilla ;

% “Thus the ultimate origin of exogamy and with it the law of

incest—since exogamy was devised to prevent incest—remains a
problem nearly as datk as ever.”—Totemism and Heogamy, 1, p.
165,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 209

for all the natives agree that only the adult
male is seen in a band; when the young male
grows up a contest takes place for mastery, and
the strongest, by killing and driving out the
others, establishes himself as the head of the
community (Dr Savage in the Boston Journal of
Natural History, Vol. V, 1845-7). The younger
males being thus driven out and wandering
about would also, when at last successful in
finding a partner, prevent too close breeding
within the limits of the same family ”®,
Atkinson ** seems to have been the first to
recognize that these conditions of the Darwinian
primal horde would in practice bring about the
exogamy of the young men, Each one of those
driven away could found a similar horde in
which, thanks to jealousy of the chief, the same
prohibition as to sexual intercourse obtained,
and in the course of time these conditions would
have brought about the rule which is now known
as law : no sexual intercourse with the members
of the horde. After the advent of totemism the
rule would have changed into a different form :
no sexual intercourse within the totem.
Andrew Lang *' declared himself in agreement
with this explanation of exogamy. But in the
same book he advocates the other theory of

# The Origin of Man, Vol. II, Chap. 20, pp. 603-4.
*° Primal Law, London, 1903 (with Andrew Lang, Social Origins).
* Seoret of the Totem, pp. 114, 143,

P

210 TOTEM AND TABOO

Durkheim which explains exogamy as a conse-
quence of the totem laws. It is not altogether
easy to combine the two interpretations ; in the
first ease exogamy would have existed before
totemism; in the second case it would be a
consequence ofit®, ~

3

Into this darkness psychoanalytic experience
throws one single ray of light.

The relation of the child to animals has much
in common with that of primitive man. The
child does not yet show any trace of the pride
which afterwards moves the adult civilized man
to set a sharp dividing line between his own
nature and that of all other animals. The child
unhesitatingly attributes full equality to ani-

*©°“‘If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the
lines of Mr. Darwin’s theory, before the totem belicfs lent to the
practice a sacred sanction, our task is relatively easy. The first
practical rule would be that of the jealous sire: ‘No males to
touch the females in my camp,’ with expulsion of adolescent sons.
In efflux of time that rule, becomine habitual, would be, “No mar-
Tinges within the local group.” Next let the local groups receive
names such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rulo
becomes, ‘No marriage within the local group of animal name ; no
Snipe to marry a Snipe.” But, if the primal groups were not
‘exogamous they would become so as soon as totemic myths and
taboos were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and other
names of small local groups.”—Seoret of the Totem, p. 143. (‘The
italics above are minc).—In his last expression on the subject
(Folklore, December, 1911), Andrew Lang states, however, that
he has given up the derivation of exogamy out of the “ general
totemic” taboo.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 211

mals; he probably feels himself more closely
related to the animal than to the undoubtedly
mysterious adult, in the freedom with which he
acknowledges his needs.

Not infrequently a curious disturbance mani-
fests itself in this excellent understanding be-
tween child and animal. ‘The child suddenly
begins to fear a certain animal species and to
protect himself against seeing or touching any
individual of this species. There results the
clinical picture of an animal phobia, which is one
of the most frequent among the psychoneurotic
diseases of this age and perhaps the earlicst
form of such an ailment. ‘The phobia is as a
rule in regard to animals for which the child has
until then shown the liveliest interest and has
nothing to do with the individual animal. In
cities the choice of animals which can become
the object of phobia is not great. They are
horses, dogs, cats, more seldom birds, and strik-
ingly often very small animals like bugs and
butterflies. Sometimes animals which are
known to the child only from picture books and
fairy stories become objects of the senseless and
inordinate anxiety which is manifested with
these phobias ; it is seldom possible to learn the
manner in which such an unusual choice of
anxiety hasbeen'brought about. Iam indebted
to Dr Karl Abraham for the report of a case in

2120 TOTEM AND ‘TABOO

which the child itself explained its fear of wasps
by saying that the colour and the stripes of the
body of the wasp had made it think of the tiger
of which, from all that it had heard, it might
well be afraid.

The animal phobias have not yet been made
the object of careful analytical investigation,
although they very much merit it. The difficul-
ties of analysing children of so tender an age
have probably been the motive of such neglect.
It cannot therefore be asserted that the general
meaning of these illnesses is known, and I myself
do not think that it would turn out to be the
same in all cases. Butanumberof such phobias
directed against larger animals have proved
accessible to analysis and have thus betrayed
their seeret to the investigator. In every case it
was the same: the fear at bottom was of the
father, if the children examined were boys, and
was merely displaced upon the animal.

Every one of any experience in psychoanaly-
sis has undoubtedly seen such cases and has
received the samé impression from them. But
I can refer to only a few detailed reports on the
subject. This is an accident of the literature of
such cases, from which the conclusion should not
be drawn that our general assertion is based on
merely scattered observation. For instance I
mention an author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 213

very intelligently occupied himself with the
neuroses of childhood. Ie tells, in relating the
history of an illness, that a nine year old boy
suffered from a dog phobia at the age of four.
“ When he saw a dog running by on the street
he wept and cried : ‘ Dear dog, don’t touch me,
I will be good.’” By “ being good ” he meant.
“not to play violin any more” (to practise
onanism) 5°,

The same author later sums up as follows:
“ His dog phobia is really his fear of the father
displaced upon the dog, for his peeuliar expres-
sion: ‘ Dog, I will be good ’—that is to say, I
will not masturbate—really refers to the father
who has forbidden masturbation.” He then
adds something in a note which fully agrees
with my experience and at the same time bears
witness to the abundance of such experiences:
“such phobias (of horses, dogs, cats, chickens
and other domestic animals) are, I think, at least
as prevalent as pavor nocturnus in childhood,
and usually reveal themselves in the analysis as
a displacement of fear from one of the parents
to animals. I am not prepared to assert that
the wide-spread mouse and rat phobia has the
same mechanism.”

I reported the “ Analysis of the Phobia of a

#88 M. Wulf, Coniributions to Infantile Sexuality, Zentral,
fs Poychoanalyze, 1912, II, No. I, p. 15,

214 TOTEM AND TABOO

five-year-old Boy” ** which the father of the
little patient had put at my disposal. It was a
fear of horses as a result of which the boy refused
to go on the street. He expressed his apprehen-
sion that the horse would come into the room
and bite him. It proves that this was meant to
be the punishment for his wish that the horse
should fall over (die). After assurances had
relieved the boy of his fear of his father, it proved
that he was fighting against wishes whose con-
tent was the absence (departure or death) of the
father. He indicated only too plainly that he
felt the father to be his rival for the favour
of the mother, upon whom his budding sexual
wishes were by dark premonitions directed. He
therefore had the typical attitude of the male
child to its parents which we call the ‘ Oedipus
complex’ in which we recognize the central
complex of the neuroses in general. Through
the analysis of ‘little John’ we have learnt a
fact which is very valuable in relation to totem-
ism, namely, that under such conditions the
child displaces a part of its feclings from the
father upon some animal.

Analysis showed the paths of association,
both significant and accidental in content, along
which such a displacement took place. It also
allowed one to guess the motives for the dis-

4% Little Hans, trans, by A. A. Brill (Moffat, Yard & Co., N.Y.).

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 215

placement. The hate which resulted from the
rivalry for the mother could not permeate the
boy’s psychic life without being inhibited; he
had to contend with the tenderness and admira-
tion which he had felt for his father from the
beginning, so that the child assumed a double or
ambivalent emotional attitude towards the
father and relieved himself of this ambivalent
conflict by displacing his hostile and anxious
feelings upon a substitute for the father. The
displacement could not, however, relieve the
conflict by bringing about a smooth division
between the tender and the hostile feelings. On
the contrary, the conflict was continued in refer-
ence to the object to which displacement has
been made and to which also the ambivalence
spreads. ‘There was no doubt that little John
had not only fear, but respect and interest for
horses. As soon as his fear was moderated he
identified himself with the feared animal; he
jumped around like a horse, and now it was he
who bit the father °°. In another stage of solu-
tion of the phobia he did not scruple to identify
his parents with other large animals *.

We may venture the impression that certain
traits of totemism return as a negative expres-
sion in these animal phobias of children. But

* Lo, p. 41. .
= “The Phantasy of tho Giraffe, L.e., p. 30,

216 TOTEM AND TABOO

we are indebted to S. Ferenczi for a beautiful
individual observation of what must be called
a case of positive totemism in the child ®, It is
true that with the little Arpad, whom Ferenczi
reports, the totemie interests do not awaken in
direct connexion with the Oedipus complex, but
on the basis of a narcistie premise, namely, the
fear of castration. But whoever looks attcn-
tively through the history of little John will also
find there abundant proof that the father was
admired as the possessor of large genitals and
was feared as threatening the child’s own geni-
tals. Inthe Oedipus as well as in the castration
complex the father plays the same réle of feared
opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Cas-
tration and its substitute through blinding is the
punishment he threatens ®.

“When little Arpad was two and a half years
old he once tried, while at a summer resort, to
urinate into the chicken coop, and on this occa-
sion a chicken bit his penis or snapped at it.
When he returned to the same place a year later
he became a chicken himself, was interested only
in the chicken coop and in everything that
occurred er and gave up human speech for

8. Ferenezi, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, p. 204, trans-
lated by Emest Jones (Badger, Boston, 1916).

* Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank, and
Eder about the substitution of blindness in the Oedipus myth for
castration, Intern. Zeitschrift j. drizl. Psychoanalyze, 1913, 1,

No. 2,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE QF TOTEMISM 217

cackling and crowing. During the period of
observation, at the age of five, he spoke again,
but his speech was exclusively about chickens
and other fowl. He played with no other toy
and sang only songs in which there was some-
thing about poultry. THis behaviour towards
his totem animal was subtly ambivalent, ex-
pressing itself in immoderate hating and loving.
He loved best to play killing chickens. “ The
slaughtering of poultry was quite a festival for
him. He could dance around the animals’
bodies for hours at a time in a state of intense
excitement *.” But then he kissed and stroked
the slaughtered animal, and cleaned and ecares-
sed the chicken effigies which he himself had
ill-used.

Arpad himself saw to it that the meaning of
his curious activity could not remain hidden.
At times he translated his wishes from the to-
temic method of expression back into that of
everyday life. ‘‘ Now I am small, now I am a
chicken. When I get bigger I shall be a fowl.
When I am bigger still, I shall be a cock.” On
another‘occasion he suddenly expressed the wish
to eat a “ potted mother ” (by analogy, potted
fowl). He was very free with open threats of
castration against others, just as he himself had

% Ferenczi, he, p. 209,

218 TOTEM AND TABOO

received them on account of onanistie preoceu-
pation with his penis,

According to Ferenczi there was no doubt as
to the source of his interest in the activities of
the chicken yard: “ The continual sexual ac-
tivity between cock and hen, the laying of eggs
and the creeping out of the young brood” *
satisfied his sexual curiosity which really was
directed towards human family life. His-ob-
ject wishes have been formed on the model of
chicken life when we find him saying to a woman
neighbour: ‘I am going to marry you and
your sister and my three cousins and the cook ;
no, instead of the cook I’ll marry my mother.”

We shall be able to complete our consideration
of these observations later ; at present we will
only point out two traits that show a valuable
correspondence with totemism : the complete
identification with the totem animal **, and the
ambivalent affective attitude towards it. In
view of these observations we consider ourselves
justified in substituting the father for the totem
animal in the male’s formula of totemism. We
then notice that in doing so we have taken no
new or especially daring step. For primitive
men say it themselves and, as far as the totemie

Ferenczi, Lc., p. 212,
Frazer finds that the essence of totemism is in this identifica-

tion: “Totemisn is an identification of a man with his totem.”
Totemism and Bxogamy, IV, p. 5.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 219

system is still in effect to-day, the totem is called
ancestor and primal father. We have only
taken literally an expression of these races
which cthnologists did not know what to do with
and were therefore inclined to put it into the
background. Psychoanalysis warns us, on the
contrary, to emphasize this very point’ and to
connect it with the attempt to explain totem-
ism *.

The first result of our substitution is very
remarkable. If the totem animal is the father,
then the two main commandments of totemism,
the two taboo rules which constitute its nu-
cleus;—not to kill the totem animal and not to
use a woman belonging to the same totem for
sexual purposes,—agree in content with the two
crimes of Oedipus, who slew his father and took
his mother to wife, and also with the child’s two
primal wishes whose insufficient repression or
whose re-awakening forms the nucleus of per-
haps all neuroses. If this similarity is more
than a deceptive play of accident it would per-
force make it possible for us to shed light upon
the origin of totemism in prehistoric times. In
other words, we should suceced in making it

*7 Lam indebted to Otto Rank for the report of a ense of dog
phobia in an intelligent young man whose explanation of how he
‘acquired his ailment sounds remarkably like the totem theory of
‘the Aruntas mentioned above. He had heard from his father that
his mother at one time during her pregnaney had been frightened
by a dog.

220 TOTEM AND TABOO

probable that. the totemie system resulted from
the conditions underlying the Oedipus complex,
just as the animal phobia of ‘little John’ and
the poultry perversion of little Arpad ’ resulted
from it. In order to trace this possibility we
shall in what follows study a peculiarity of the
totemie system or, as we may say, of the totemic
religion, which until now could hardly be brought
into the discussion.

4

W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was
a physicist, philologist, Bible critic, and archa-
ologist, a many-sided as well as keen and free-
thinking man, expressed the assumption in his
work, The Religion of the Semites *, published in
1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the so-called
tolem feast, had, from. the very beginning,
formed an integral part of the totemic system.
For the support of this supposition he had at
his disposal at that;time only a single description
of such an act from the year 500 A.p.; he knew,
however, how to give a high degree of probability
to his assumption through his analysis of the
nature of sacrifice among the old Semites. As
sacrifice assumes a godlike person we are dealing
here with an inference from a higher phase of
religious rite to its lowest phase in totemism.

%© The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 221

I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s ex-
cellent book ** those statements about the origin
and meaning of the sacrificial right which are of
great interest to us; I shall omit the only too
numerous tempting details as well as the parts
dealing with all later developments. In such
an excerpt it is quite impossible to give the
reader any sense of the lucidity or of the argu-
mentative force of the original.

Robertson Smith shows that sacrifice at the
altar was the essential part of the rite of old
religions. It plays the same réle in all religions,
so that its origin must be traced back to very
general causes whose effects were everywhere
the same. u

But the sacrifiee—the holy action xar&oyn
(sacrifieium öepovpyia)—originally meant some-
thing different from what later times under-
stood by it : the offering to the deity in order to
reconcile him or to incline him to be favourable.
‘The profane use of the word was afterwards
derived from the secondary sense of self-denial.
As is demonstrated the first sacrifice was
nothing else than “ an act of social fellowship
between the deity and his worshippers ”.

Things to eat and drink were brought as sacri-
fice ; man offered to his god the same things as
those on which he himself lived, flesh, cereals,

9 The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.

222 TOTEM AND TABOO

fruits, wine and oil. Only in regard to sacrificial
flesh did there exist restrictions and exceptions.
The god partakes of the animal sacrifices with his
worshippers while the vegetable sacrifices are left
to him alone. There is no doubt that animal
sacrifices are older and at one time were the only
forms of sacrifice. The vegetable sacrifices re-
sulted from the offering of the first-fruits and
correspond to a tribute to the lord of the soil and
the land. But animal sacrifice is older than
agriculture.

. Linguistic survivals make it certain that the
part of the sacrifice destined for the god was
looked upon as his real food. This conception
became offensive with the progressive dema-
terialization of the deity, and was avoided by
offering the deity only the liquid part of the
meal, Later the use of fire, which made the
sacrificial flesh ascend in smoke from the altar,
made it possible to prepare human food in such
a way that it was more suitable for the deity.
The drink sacrifice was originally the blood of
the sacrificed animals ; wine was uscd later as a
substitute for the blood. Primitive man looked
upon wine as the “ blood ofthe grape”, as our
poets still call it.

The oldest form of sacrifice, older than the use
of fire and the knowledge of agriculture, was
therefore the sacrifice of animals, whose flesh

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 223

and blood the god and his worshippers ate
together. It was essential that both parti-
cipants should receive their shares of the meal.

Such a sacrifice was a public ceremony, the
celebration of a whole clan. As a matter of fact
all religion was a publie affair; religious duty
was a part of the social obligation. Sacrifice
and festival go together among all races; each
sacrifice entails a holiday and no holiday can be
celebrated without a sacrifice, The sacrificial
festival was an occasion for joyously transcend-
ing one’s own interests and emphasizing social
community and community with god.

The ethical power of the public sacrificial
feast was based upon primal conceptions of the
meaning of eating and drinking in common.
To eat and drink with some one was at the same
time a symbol and a confirmation of social
community and of the assumption of mutual
obligations ; the sacrificial cating gave direct
expression to the fact that the god and his
worshippers are communicants, thus confirming
all their other relations. Customs that to-day
still are in force among the Arabs of the desert
prove that the binding force resulting from the
common meal is not a religious factor but that
the subsequent mutual obligations are due to
the act of eating itself. Whoever has shared
the smallest bite with such a Bedouin, or has

224 TOTEM AND TABOO

taken a swallow of his milk, need not fear him
any longer as an enemy, but may be sure of his
protection and help. Not indeed, forever,
strictly speaking this lasts only while it may be
assumed that the food partaken remains in the
body. So realistically is the bond of union
conceived ; it requires repetition to strengthen
it and make it endure.

But why is this binding power ascribed to
eating and drinking in common ? In the most
primitive societies there is only one uncondi-
tional and never failing bond, that of kinship.
The members of a community stand by each
other jointly and severally, a kin is a group of
persons whose life is so bound into a physical
unity that they can be considered as parts of a
common life. In case of the murder of one of
this kin they therefore do not say : the blood of
so and so has been spilt, but our blood has been
spilt. The Hebraic phrase by which the tribal
relation is acknowledged is: “ Thou art my
bone and my flesh ”. Kinship therefore signi-
fies having part in a general substance. It is
natural then that it is based not only upon
the fact that we are a part of the substance of
our mother who has borne us, and whose milk
nourished us, but also that the food caten later
through which the body is renewed, can acquire
and strengthen kinship. If one shared a meal

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 225

with one’s god the conviction was thus expressed.
that one was of the same substance as he; no
meal was therefore partaken with any one
recognized as a stranger.

The sacrificial repast was therefore originally
a feast of the kin, following the rule that only
those of kin could eat together. In our society
the meal unites the members of the family ; but
the sacrificial repast has nothing to do with the
family. Kinship is older than family life ; the
oldest families known to us regularly comprised
persons who belonged to various bonds of kin-
ship. ‘The men married women of strange clans
and the children inherited the clan of the
mother ; there was no kinship between the man
and the rest of the members of the family. In
such a family there was no common meal.
Even to-day savages eat apart and alone, and
the religious prohibitions of totemism as to
eating often make it impossible for them to eat
with their wives and children.

Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal.
There was, as we have heard, no meeting of the
kin without animal sacrifice, but, and this is
significant, no animal was slaughtered except
for such a solemn occasion. Without any
hesitation the people ate fruits, game and the
milk of domestic animals, but religious scruples
made it impossible for the individual to kill a

a

226 TOTEM AND TABOO

domestic animal for his own use. There is not
the least doubt, says Robertson Smith, that
every sacrifice was originally a clan sacrifice,
and that the killing of a sacrificial animal origin-
ally belonged to those acts which were forbidden
to the individual and were only justified if the
whole kin assumed the responsibility. Primitive
men had only one class of actions which were
thus characterized, namely, actions which
touched the holiness of the kin’s common blood.
A life which no individual might take and which
could be sacrificed only through the consent and
participation of all the members of the clan was
on the same plane as the life of a member of the
kin. The rule that every guest of the sacrificial
repast must partake of the flesh of the sacrificial
animal, had the same meaning as the rule that
the execution of a guilty member of the kin must
be performed by the whole kin. In other words :
the sacrificial animal was treated like one of kin ;
the sacrificing community, its god, and the sacri-
ficial animal were of the same blood, and the
members of a clan.

On the basis of much evidence Robertson
Smith identifies the sacrificial animal with the
old totem animal. In a later age there were
two kinds of sacrifices, those of domestic
animals which usually were also eaten, and the
unusual sacrifice of animals which were forbid-

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 227

den as being unclean. Further investigation
then shows that these unclean animals were
holy and that they were sacrificed to the gods to
whom they were holy, that these animals were
originally identified with the gods themselves
and that at the sacrifice the worshippers in some
way emphasized their blood relationship to the
god and to the animal. But this difference
between usual and ‘ mystic ’ sacrifices does not
hold good for still earlier times. Originally all
animals were holy, their meat was forbidden and
might be eaten only on solemn occasions, with
the participation of the whole kin. The slaugh-
ter of the animal amounted to the spilling of the
kin’s blood and had to be done with the same
precautions and assurances against reproach.

The taming of domestic animals and the rise
of cattle-breeding seems everywhere to have
put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism
of earliest times ”°. But such holiness as still
clung to domestic animals in what was now a
‘pastoral’ religion, is sufficiently distinct for
us to recognize its totemic character. Even in
late classical times the rite in several localitics
prescribed flight for the sacrificer after the

19 “The inference is that the domestication to which totemism
leads (when there are any animals capable of domestication) is
fatal to totemism.” Jevons, Introduction to the History of Réligion,
1911, fifth edition, p. 120.

228 TOTEM AND TABOO

sacrifice, as if to escape revenge. In Greece
the idea must once have been general that the
killing of an ox was really a crime. At the
Athenian festival of the Bouphonia a formal
trial, to which all the participants were sum-
moned, was instituted after the sacrifice. Fin-
ally it was agreed to put the blame for the
murder upon the knife, which was then cast into
the sea.

In spite of the dread which protects the life
of the animal as being of kin, it became neces-
sary to kill it from time to time in solemn con-
clave, and to divide its flesh and blood among
the members of the clan. The motive which
commands this act reveals the deepest meaning
of the essence of sacrifice. We have heard that
in later times every eating in common, the parti-
cipation in the same substance which entered
into their bodies, established a holy bond
between the communicants; in oldest time
this meaning seemed to be attached only to
participation in the substance of a holy sacrifice.
The holy mystery of the sacrificial death was
justified in that only in this way could the holy
bond be established which united the participants
with each other and with their god".

This bond was nothing else than the life of the
sacrificial animal which lived on its flesh and

7 Ley p. 313.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 229

blood and was shared by all the participants by
means of the sacrificial feast. Such an idea was
the basis of all the blood bonds through which
men in still later times became pledged to each
other. The thoroughly realistic conception of
consanguinity as an identity of substance makes
comprehensible the necessity of renewing it
from time to time through the physical process
of the sacrificial repast.

We will now stop quoting from Robertson
Smith’s train of thought in order to give a
condensed summary of what is essential in it.
When the idea of private property came into
existence sacrifice was conceived as a gift to the
deity, as a transfer from the property of man
to that of the god. But this interpretation left
all the peculiarities of the sacrificial ritual unex-
plained. In oldest times the sacrificial animal
itself had been holy and its life inviolate ; it
could be taken only in the presence of the god,
with the whole tribe taking part and sharing the
guilt in order to furnish the holy substance
through the eating of which the members of the
clan assured themselves of their material identity
with each other and with the deity. The sacrifice
‘was a sacrament, and the sacrificial animal itself
was one of the kin. In reality it was the old
totem animal, the primitive god himself through
the slaying and eating of whom the members of

230 TOTEM AND TABOO

the clan revived and assured their similarity
with the god.

From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice
Robertson Smith drew the conclusion that the
periodic killing and cating of the totem before
the period when the anthropomorphic deities
were venerated was an important part of totem
religion. The ceremonial of such a totem feast
was preserved for us, he thought, in the de-
scription of a sacrifice in later times. Saint
Nilus tells of a sacrificial custom of the Bedouins
in the desert of Sinai towards the end of the
fourth century a.p. The victim, a camel, was
bound and laid upon a rough altar of stones ;
the leader of the tribe made the participants
walk three times around the altar to the accom-
paniment of song, inflicted the first wound upon
the animal and greedily drank the spurting
blood ; then the whole community threw itself
upon the sacrifice, cut off pieces of the palpitat-
ing flesh with their swords and ate them raw in
such haste that in a short interval between the
rise of the morning star, for whom this sacrifice
was meant, and its fading before the rays of the
sun, the whole sacrificial animal, flesh, skin,
bones, and entrails, were devoured. According
to every testimony this barbarous rite, which
speaks of great antiquity, was not a rare custom
but the general original form of the totem sacri-

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 281

fice, which in later times underwent the most
varied modifications.

Many authors have refused to grant any
weight to this conception of the totem feast
because it could not be strengthened by direct
observation at the stage of totemism. Robertson
Smith himself has referred to examples in which
the sacramental meaning of sacrifices seems cer-
tain, such as the human sacrifices of the Aztees
and others which recall the conditions of the
totem feast, the bear sacrifices of the bear tribe
of the Ouataouaks in America, and the bear fes-
tival of the Ainus in Japan. Frazer has given
a full account of these and similar cases in the
two divisions of his great work that have last
appeared’?, An Indian tribe in California
which reveres the buzzard, a large bird of prey,
killsit once a year with solemn ceremony, where-
upon the bird is mourned and its skin and
feathers preserved. The Zuni Indians in New
Mexico do the same thing with their holy turtle.

In the Intichiuma eeremonies of Central Aus-
tralian tribes a trait has been observed which
fits in excellently with the assumptions of
Robertson Smith. Every tribe that practises
magic for the increase of its totem, which it can-
not eat itself, is bound to eat a part of its totem

18 The Golden Bough, Part V; Spirits of the Corn and of the
Wild, 1912, in the chapters: “Eating the God and Killing the
Divino Animal.”

232 TOTEM AND TABOO

at the ceremony before it can be touched by the
other tribes. According to Frazer the best
example of the sacramental consumption of the
otherwise forbidden totem is to be found among
the Bini in West Africa, in connexion with the
burial ceremony of this tribe ®.

But we shall follow Robertson Smith in the
assumption that the sacramental killing and the
common consumption of the otherwise forbidden
totem animal was an important trait of the
totem religion **,

5

Let us now envisage the scene of such a totem
meal and let us embellish it further with a few
probable features which could not be adequately
considered before. Thus we have the clan,
which on a solemn oceasion kills its totem in a
cruel manner and cats it raw, blood, flesh, and
bones. At the same time the members of the
clan disguised in imitation of the totem, mimic
it in sound and moyement as if they wanted to
emphasize their common identity. ‘There is
also the conscious realization that an action
is being carried out which is forbidden to each
individual and which can only be justified

% Frazer, Tolem and. Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 590.

% 1 am not ignorant of the objetions to This theory of socrfioe

as expressed by Marillier, Hubert, Mauss and others, but they
haye not essentially impaired the theories of Robertson Smith,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 233

through the participation of all, so that no one
is allowed to exclude himself from the killing
and the feast. After the act is accomplished
the murdered animal is bewailed and lamented.
‘The death lamentation is compulsive, being
enforced by the fear of a threatening retribu-
tion, and its main purpose is, as Robertson
Smith remarks on an analogous occasion, to
exculpate oneself from responsibility for the
slaying **.

But after this mourning there follows loud
festival gaicty accompanied by the unchaining
of every impulse and the permission of every
gratification. Here we find an easy insight into
the nature of the holiday.

A holiday is permitted, or rather a prescribed
excess, a solemn violation of a prohibition.
People do not commit the excesses which at all
times have characterized holidays, as a result of
an order to be in a holiday mood, but because
in the very nature of a holiday there is excess ;
the holiday mood is brought about by the
release of what is otherwise forbidden.

But what has mourning over the death of the
totem animal to do with the introduction of this
holiday spirit? If men are happy over the
slaying of the totem, which is otherwise for-
bidden to them, why do they also mourn it ?

1% Religion of the Semites, 2nd Edition, 1907, p. 412,

234 TOTEM AND TABOO

We have heard that members of a clan be-
come holy through the consumption of the
totem and thereby also strengthen their identifi-
cation with itandwith each other. Thefact that
they have absorbed the holy life with which the _
substance of the totem is charged may explain
the holiday mood and everything that results
from it.

Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the
totem animal is really a substitutefor the father,
and this really explains the contradiction that it
is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal,
that the killing of it resultsin a holiday and that
the animal is killed and yet mourned. The
ambivalent emotional attitude which to-day
still marks the father complex in our children
and so often continues into adult life also
extended to the father substitute of the totem
animal.

But if we associate the translation of the
totem as given by psychoanalysis, with the

"totem. feast and the Darwinian hypothesis
about the primal state of human society, a
deeper understanding becomes possible and a
hypothesis is offered which may seem fantastic
but which has the advantage of establishing an
unexpected unity among a serics of hitherto
separated phenomena.

The Darwinian conception of the primal

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 235

horde does not, of course, allow for the begin-
ning of totemism. There is only a violent,
jealous father who keeps all the females for him-
self and drives away the growing sons. This
primal state of society has nowhere been ob-
served. The most primitive organization we
know, which to-day is still in foree with certain
tribes, is associations of men consisting of mem-
bers with equal rights, subject to the restric-
tions of the totemie system, and founded on
matriarchy, or descent through the mother '*,
Can the one have resulted from the other, and
‚ how was this possible ? :

By basing our argument upon the celebration
of the totem we are in a position to give an
answer : One day *” the expelled brothers joined
forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an
end to the father horde. ‘Together they dared
and accomplished what would have remained
impossible for them singly. Perhaps some ad-
vance in culture, like the use of a new weapon,
had given them the feeling of superiority. Of
course these cannibalistic savages ate their vie-
tim. This violent primal father had surely

7 For a recent contribution compare The Whole House of the
Chilkat, by G. T. Emmons (American Museum Journal, Vol. XVI,
No. 7.) [Translator].

77 The reader will avoid the erroneous impression which this
exposition may call forth by taking into consideration the conelud-
ing sentence of the subsequent. chapter,

236 TOTEM AND TABOO

been the envied and feared model for each of the
brothers. Now they accomplished their identi-
fication with him by devouring him and cach
acquired a part of his strength. The totem
feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first eelebra-
tion, would be the repetition and commemora-
tion of this memorable, criminal act with which
so many things began, social organization,
moral restrictions and religion ’®.

78 The secmingly monstrous assumption that the tyrannical
father was overcome and slain by a combination of the expelled
sons has also been accepted by Atkinson as a direct result of the
eonditions of the Darwinian. primal horde. “A youthful band
of brothers living together in forced celibacy, or at most in poly-
androus relation with some single female captive. A horde as yet
weak in thcir impubescence they are, but they would, when strength
‘Was gained with timo, inovitably wrench by-combined attacks,
renewed again and again, both wife and lifo from the paternal
tyrant” (Primal Taw, pp. 220-1), Atkinson, who spent his
life in New Caledonia and had unusual opportunities to study
the natives, also refors to the fact that the conditions of tho primul
horde which Darwin assumes can easily bo observed among herds
of wild cattle and horses and regularly lead to the killing of the
father animsl He then assumes further that a disintegration
of the horde took place after the removal of the father through
embittcred fighting among the victorious sons, which (hus precluded
the origin of a now organization of society; ‘An ever recurring
violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant by sons, whose
parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal strife ”
(p-228). Atkinson, who did .not have the suggestions of psycho-
analysis at his command and did not know the studies of Robertson
Smith, finds a less violent transition from the primal horde to tho
noxt social stage in which many mon live together in peaceful
accord. He atiributes it to maternal love that at first only the
youngest sons and Intor others too remain in the horde, who in
Telurn for this toleration acknowledge the sexual prerogative of
‘the father by the restraint which they practise towards the mother
and towards their sisters.

So much for the very remarkable theory of Atkinson, its essen-

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 237~

In order to find these results acceptable, quite
aside from our supposition, we need only assume
that the group of brothers banded together were
dominated by the same contradictory feelings
towards the father which we can demonstrate as
the contentof ambivalence of the father complex
in all our children and in neurotics. They hated
the father who stood so powerfully in the way
of their sexual demands and their desire for
power, but they also loved and admired him,
After they had satisfied their hate by his
removal and had carried out their wish for
indentification with him, the suppressed tender
impulses had to assert themselves’®. This took
place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was
formed which coincided here with the remorse
gencrally felt. The dead now became stronger
than the living had been, even as we observe it
to-day in the destinies of men. What the
fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they
tial correspondence with the theory here expounded, and its point
of departure which makes it necessary to relinquish so much else,

I must ascribe the indefiniteness, the disregard of time interval,
and the crowding of the material in the above exposition to a re-
straint which the nature of the subject demands. It would be
just as meaningless to strive for exactness in this material as it
‘would be unfair to demand certainty here.

72 This new emotional attitude must. also have been responsible
for the fact that the deed could not bring full satisfaction to any
of the perpetrators. In a certain sense it had been in vain. For
none of the sons could carry out his original wish of taking the

place of the father, But failure is, as we know, much more favour-
able to moral reaction than success,

238 TOTEM AND TABOO

themselves now prohibited in the psychic
situation of ‘subsequent obedience’ which
we know so well from psychoanalysis. They
undid their deed by declaring that the killing
of the father substitute, the totem, was not
allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed
by denying themselves the liberated women.
Thus they created the two fundamental taboos
of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son,
and for this very reason these had to correspond
with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus
complex. Whoever disobeyed became guilty
of the two only crimes which troubled primitive
society *°.

The two taboos of totemism with which the
morality of man begins are psychologically not
of equal value. One of them, the sparing of the
totem animal, rests entirely upon emotional mo-

_ tives; the father had been removed and no-
thing in reality could make up for this. But the
other, the incest prohibition, had, besides, a
strong practical foundation. Sexual need does
not unitemen ; itseparatesthem. Though the
brothers had joined forces in order to over-
come the father, each was the other’s rival
among the women. Each one wanted to have

40 “Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the
saored law of blood ate in primitive society the only crimes of
which the community as such takes cognizance . . .”” Religion of
the Semites, p. 419.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 239

them all to himself like the father, and in the
fight of each against the other the new organiza-
tion would have perished. For there was no
longer any one stronger than all the rest who
could have successfully assumed the réle of the
father. Thus there was nothing left for the
brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to
erect. the incest prohibition—perhaps after
many difficult experiences—through which they
all equally renounced the women whom they
desired, and on account of whom they had
removed the father in the first place. ‘Thus
they saved the organization which had made
them strong and which could be based upon the
homo-sexual feelings and activities which pro-
bably manifested themselves among them dur-
ing the time of their banishment. Perhaps this
situation also formed the germ of the institution
of the mother right discovered by Bachofen,
which was then abrogated by the patriarchal
family arrangement.

On the other hand the claim of totemism to be
considered the first attempt at a religion is con-
nected with the other taboo which protects the
life of the totem animal. The feelings of the
sons found a natural and appropriate substitute
for the father in the animal, but their compul-
sory treatment of it expressed more than the
need of showing remorse. The surrogate for

240 TOTEM AND TABOO

the father was perhaps used in the attempt to
assuage the burning sense of guilt, and to bring
about a kind of reconciliation with the father.
The totemie system was a kind of agreement
with the father in which the latter granted
everything that the child’s phantasy could
expect from him, protection, care, and forbear-
ance, in return for which the pledge was given to
honour his life, that is to say, not to repeat the
act against the totem through which the real
father had perished. Totemism also contained
an attempt at justification. “ If the father had
treated us like the totem we should never have
been tempted to kill him.” Thus totemism
helped to gloss over the real state of affairs and
to make one forget the event to which it owed
its origin.

In this connexion some features were formed
which henceforth determined the character of
every religion. The totem religion had issued
from the sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt
to palliate this feeling and to conciliate the
injured father through subsequent obedience.
All later religions prove to be attempts to solve
the same problem, varying only in accordance
with the stage of culture in which they are
attempted and according to the paths which
they take; they are all, however, reactions
aiming at the same great event with which

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 241

culture began and which ever since has not let
mankind come to rest.

There is still another characteristic faithfully
preserved in religion which already appeared in
totemism at this time. ‘The ambivalent strain
was probably too great to be adjusted by any
arrangement, or else the psychological condi-
tions are entirely unfavourable to any kind of
settlement of these contradictory feelings. It
is certainly noticeable that the ambivalenee
attached to the father complex also continues
in totemism and in religions in general. The
religion of totemism included not only mani-
festations of remorse and attempts at recon-
ciliation, but also serves to commemorate the
triumph over the father. The gratification
obtained thereby creates the commemorative
celebration of the totem feast at which the
restrictions of subsequent obedience are sus-
pended, and makes it a duty to repeat the
crime of parricide through the sacrifice of the
totem animal as often as the benefits of this
deed, namely, the appropriation of the father’s
properties, threaten to disappear as a result of
the changed influences of life. We shall not be
surprised to find that a part of the son’s defiance
also reappears, often in the most remarkable .
disguises and inversions, in the formation of
later religions.

®

242 TOTEM AND TABOO

If thus far we have followed, in religion and
moral precepts—but little differentiated in to-
temism—the consequences of the tender im-
pulses towards the father as they are changed
into remorse, we must not overlook the fact that
for the most part the tendencies which have
impelled to parricide have retained the victory.
The social and fraternal feelings on which this
great change is based, henceforth for long
periods exercises the greatest influence upon
the development of society. They find expres-
sion in the sanctification of the common blood
and in the emphasis upon the solidarity of life
within the clan. In thus ensuring each other’s
lives the brothers express the fact that no one
of them is to be treated by the other as they all
treated the father. They preclude a repetition
of the fate of the father. The socially estab-
lished prohibition against fratricide is now
added to the prohibition against killing the
totem, which is based on religious grounds. It
will still be a long time before the command-
ment discards the restriction to members of
the tribe and assumes the simple phrascology :
Thou shalt not kill. At first the brother clan
has taken the place of the father horde and was
guaranteed by the blood bond. Society is now
based on complicity in the common crime,
religion on the sense of guilt and the con-

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 243

sequent remorse, while morality is based partly
on the necessities of society and partly on the
expiation which this sense of guilt demands.
‘Thus psychoanalysis, contrary to the newer
conceptions of the totemie system and more in
accord with older conceptions, bids us argue for
an intimate connexion between totemism and
exogamy as well as for their simultaneous origin.

6

I am under the influence of many strong
motives which restrain me from the attempt to
discuss the further development of religions
from their beginning in totemism up to their
present state. I shall follow out only two
threads as I see them appearing in the weft with
especial distinctness: the motive of the totem
sacrifice and the relation of the son to the
father ®ı,

Robertson Smith has shown us that the old
totem feast returns in the original form of sac-
rifiee. The meaning of the rite is the same:
sanctification through participation in the com-
mon meal. ‘The sense of guilt, which can only
be allayed through the solidarity of all the par-
ticipants, has also been retained. In addition
to this there is the tribal deity in whose sup-

® Compare Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, by

C. G. Jung, in which some dissenting points of viow arc ropro-
sented.

244 TOTEM AND TABOO

posed presence the sacrifice takes place, who
takes part in the meal like a member of the tribe,
and with whom identification is effected by the
act of eating the sacrifice. How does the god
come into this situation which originally was
foreign to him ?

The answer might be that the idea of god had
meanwhile appeared,—no one knows whence—
and had dominated the whole religious life, and
that the totem feast, like everything else that
wished to survive, had been forced to fit itself
into the new system. However, psychoanaly-
tic investigation of the individual teaches with
especial emphasis that god is in every ease
modelled after the father and that our personal
relation to god is dependent upon our relation to
our physical father, fluctuating and changing
with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but
an exalted father. Here also, as in the case of
totemism, psychoanalysis advises us to believe
the faithful, who call god father just as they
called the totem their ancestor. If psychoanaly-
sis’ deserves any consideration at all, then the
share of the father in the idea of a god must be
very important, quite aside from all the other
origins and meanings of god upon which psycho-
analysis can throw no light. But then the father

_ would be represented twice in primitive sacrifice,
first as god, and secondly as the totem-animal-
~

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 245

sacrifice, and we must ask, with all due regard
for the limited number of solutions which psy-
choanalysis offers, whether this is possible and
what the meaning of it may be.

We know that there are a number of relations
of the god to the holy animal (the totem and the
sacrificial animal): 1. Usually one animal is
sacred to every god, sometimes even several ani-
mals, 2. In certain, especially holy, sacrifices,
the so-called ‘mystical’ sacrifices, the very
animal which had been sanctified through the
god was sacrificed to him*?. 3. The god was often
revered in the form of an animal, or from
another point of view, animals enjoyed a godlike
reverence long after the period of totemism.
4.Inmyths the god is frequently transformed into
an animal, often into the animal that is sacred
tohim. From this the assumption was obyious
that the god himself was the animal, and that
he had evolved from the totem animal at a later
stage of religious feeling. But the reflection
that the totem itself is nothing but a substitute
for the father relieves us of all further discus-
sion. Thus the totem may have been the first
form of the father substitute and the god a later
one in which the father regained his human form,
Such a new creation from the root of all religious

ai ‚Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semiter, Second Edition,

246 TOTEM AND TABOO

evolution, namely, the longing for the father,
might become possible if in the course of time an
essential change had taken place in the relation
to the father and perhaps also to the animal.

Such changes are easily divined even if we dis-
regard the beginning of a psychic estrangement
from the animal as well as the disintegration of
totemism through animal domestication *. The
situation created by the removal of the father
contained an element which in the course of
time must have brought about an extraordinary
inerease of longing for the father. For the
brothers who had joined forces to kill the father
had each been animated by the wish to’become
like the father and had given expression to this
wish by incorporating parts of the substitute
for him in’the totem feast. In consequence of
the pressure which the bonds of the brother
clan exercised upon each member, this wish
had to remain unfulfilled. No one could or was
allowed to attain the father’s perfection of
power, which was the thing they had all sought.
‘Thus the bitter feeling against the father which
had incited to the deed could subside in the
course of time, while the longing for him grew,
and an ideal could arise having as a content
the fullness of power and the freedom from
restriction of the conquered primal father, as

# See above, p. 128,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 247

well as the willingness to subject themselves to
him. The original democratic equality of each
member of the tribe could no longer be retained
on account of the interference of cultural
changes ; in consequence of which there arose a
tendency to revive the old father ideal in the
creation of gods through the veneration of those
individuals who had distinguished themselves
above the rest. That a man should become a
god and that a god should die, which to-day
seems to us an outrageous presumption, was
still by no means offensive to the conceptions of
classical antiquity **. But the deification of
the murdered father from whom the tribe now
derived its origin, was a much more serious
attempt at expiation than the former covenant
with the totem.

In this evolution I am at a loss to indicate the
place of the great maternal deities who perhaps
everywhere preceded the paternal deities. But
it seems certain that the change in the relation
to the father was not restricted to religion but
logically extended to the other side of human

+ “To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the
human and divine has deepened into an impassable gulf, such
mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients.
"To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many familics
traced their descent from a divinity, and tho deification of a man
probably seemed as little extraordinary to thom as the canoniza-

tion of a saint seems to a modern Catholic.” Frazer, The Golden
Bough, I; The Magie Art and the Evolution of Kings, Il, p. 177,

248 TOTEM AND TABOO

life influenced by the removal of the father,
namely, the social organization. With the
institution of paternal deities the fatherless
society gradually changed into a patriarchal
one. The family was a reconstruction of the
former primal horde and also restored a great
part of their former rights to the fathers. Now
there were patriarchs again but the social
achievements of the brother clan had not been
given up and the actual difference between the
new family patriarchs and the unrestricted
primal father was great enough to ensure the
continuation of the religious need, the preserva-
tion of the unsatisfied longing for the father.
The father therefore really appears twice in
the scene of sacrifice before the tribal god, once
as the god and again as the totem-sacrificial-
animal. But in attempting to understand this
situation we must beware of interpretations
which superficially seck to translate it as an
allegory, and which forget the historical stages
in the process. The twofold presence of the
father corresponds to the two successive mcan-
ings of the scene. The ambivalent attitude
towards the father as well as the victory of the
son’s tender emotional feelings over his hostile _
ones, have here found plastic expression. The
scene of vanquishing the father, his greatest
degradation, furnishes here the material to

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 249

represent his highest triumph. The meaning
which sacrifice has quite generally acquired is
found in the fact that in the very same action
which continues the memory of this misdeed it
offers satisfaction to the father for the ignominy
put upon him.

In the further development the animal loses
its sacredness and the sacrifice its relation to the
celebration of the totem; the rite becomes a
simple offering to the deity, a self-deprivation in
favour of the god. God himself is now so ex-
alted above man that he can be communicated
with only through a priest as intermediary.
At the same time the social order produces
godlike kings who transfer the patriarchal sys-
tem to the state. It must be said that the
revenge of the deposed and reinstated father has
been very cruel ; it culminated in the dominance
of authority. The subjugated sons have used
the new relation to disburden themselves still
more of their sense of guilt. Sacrifice, as it is
now constituted, is entirely beyond their respon-
sibility. God himself has demanded and or-
dained it. Myths in which the god himself kills
the animal that is sacred to him, which he him-
self really is, belong to this phase. This is
the greatest possible denial of the great misdeed
with which society and the sense of guilt began.
There is an unmistakable second meaning in

250 TOTEM AND TABOO

this sacrificial demonstration. It expresses sat-
isfaction at the fact that the earlier father substi-
tute has been abandoned in favour of the higher
conception of god. The superficial allegorical
translation of the scene here roughly corres-
ponds with its psychoanalytic interpretation by
saying that the god is represented as overcoming
the animal part of his nature **.

But it would be erroneous to believe that in
this period of renewed patriarchal authority
the hostile impulses which belong to the father
complex had entirely subsided. On the con-
trary, the first phases in the domination of the
two new substitutive formations for the father,
those of gods and kings, plainly show the most
energetic expression of that ambivalence which

is characteristic of religion.

In his great work, The Golden Bough, Frazer
has expressed the conjecture that the first
kings of the Latin tribes were strangers who
played the part of a deity and were solemnly
sacrificed in this role on specified holidays.

#5 It is known that the overcoming of one generation of gods by
another in mythology represents the historical process of the sub-
stitution of one religious aystem by another, either as the result
of conquest by a strange race or by means of a peychological develop-
ment, In the latter case the myth approaches the “functional
phenomena” in H. Silberer’s sense. ‘That the god who kills the
‘animal is a symbol of the libido, as asserted by C. G. Jung (L.c.),
presupposes a different. conception of the libido from that hitherto
held, and at any rate seems to me questionable,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 251

The yearly sacrifice (self-sacrifice is a variant) of
a god seems to have been an important feature
of Semitic religions. The ceremony of human
sacrifice in various parts. of the inhabited
world makes it certain that these human beings
ended their lives as representatives of the deity.
This sacrificial custom can still be traced in
later times in the substitution of an inanimate
imitation (doll) for the living person. The
theanthropie god sacrifice into which unfor-
tunately I cannot enter with the same thorough-
ness with which the animal sacrifice has been
treated throws the clearest light upon the mean-
ing of the older forms of sacrifice. It acknow-
ledges with unsurpassable candour that the
object of the sacrificial action has always been
the same, being identical with what is now
revered as a god, namely with the father.
The question as to the relation of animal to
human sacrifice can now be casily solved. - The
original animal sacrifice was already a substi-
tute for a human sacrifice, for the solemn killing
of the father, and when the father substitute
regained its human form, the animal substitute
could also be retransformed into a human sacri-
fice.

Thus the memory of*that first great act of
sacrifice had proved to be indestructible despite
all attempts to forget it, and just at the moment

252 TOTEM AND TABOO

when men strove to get as far away as possible
from its motives, the undistorted repetition of it
had to appear in the form of the god sacrifice.
Ineed not fully indicate here the developments
of religious thought which made this return pos-
sible in the form of rationalizations. Robert-
son Smith who is, of course, far removed from
the idea of tracing sacrifice back to this great
event of man’s primal history, says that the cere-
mony of the festivals in which the old Semites
celebrated the death of a deity were interpreted
as “a commemoration of a mythical tragedy ”
and that the attendant lament was not charac-
terized by spontaneous sympathy, but displayed
a compulsive character, something that was im-
posed by the fear of a divine wrath **. We are
in a position to acknowledge that this interpre-
tation was correct, the feelings of the celebrants
being well explained by the basic situation.

We may now accept it as a fact that in the
further development of religions these two in-
citing factors, the son’s sense of guilt and his
defiance, were never again extinguished. Every
attempted solution of the religious py and

8© Religion of the Semites, pp. 412-413. “The mo is
not a spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine canis,
but obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And
a chief object of the mourners is 1o disclaim responsibility for the
god's death—a point which has already come before us in con-
noxion with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the ‘ ox-murder at
‘Athens.’ ”

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 253

every kind of reconciliation of the two opposing
psychic forces gradually falls to the ground,
probably under the combined influence of cul-
tural changes, historical events, and inner psy-
chic transformations.

The endeavour of the son to put himself in
place of the father god, appeared with greater
and greater distinctness. - With the introdue-
tion of agrieulture the importance of the son
in the patriarchal family increased. He was
emboldened to give new expression to his incest-
uous libido which found symbolic satisfaction in
labouring over mother earth. There came into
existence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis,
‘Tammuz, and others, spirits of vegetation as
well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the
favours of maternal deities and committed
incest with the mother in defiance of the father.
But the sense of guilt which was not allayed
through these creations, was expressed in
myths which visited these youthful lovers of the
maternal goddesses with short life and punish-
ment through castration or through the wrath
of the father god appearing in animal form.
Adonis was killed by the boar, the sacred ani-
mal of Aphrodite ; Attis, the lover of Kybele,
died of castration*’. The lamentation for

87 The fear of castration plays an extraordinarily big réle in

disturbing the relations to the father in the case of our youthful
neurotics, In Ferenczi’s excellent study we have seen how the

254 TOTEM AND TABOO

these gods and the joy at their resurrection have
gone over into the ritual of another son which
divinity was destined to survive long.

When Christianity began its entry into the
ancient world it met with the competition of the
religion of Mithras and for a long time it was
doubtful which deity was to be the victor.

The bright figure of the youthful Persian god
has eluded our understanding. Perhaps we
may conclude from the illustrations of Mithras
slaying the steers that he represented the son
who carried out the sacrifice of the father by
himself and thus released the brothers from
their oppressing complicity in the deed. There
was another way of allaying this sense of guilt
‘and this is the onc that Christ took. He sacri-
ficed his own life and thereby redeemed the
brothers from primal sin.

‘The theory of primal sin is of Orphic origin ;
it was preserved in the mysteries and thence
boy recognized his totem in the animal which snaps at his little
penis. When children learn about ritual cireumeision they iden-
tify it with castration, To my knowledge the parallel in tho
psychology of races to this attitude of our children has not yot
been drawn. ‘The circumcision which was so frequent in primor-
dial times among primitive races belongs to the period of initin-
tion in which its meaning is to be found; it has only secondarily
beon relegated to an earlier timo of life. It is very interesting
that among primitive men circumcision is combined with or re-
placed by-the cutting off of the hair and the drawing of teeth,
and that our children, who cannot know anything about this,
really treat these two operations as equivalents to castration when
they display their fear of them.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 255

penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek
antiquity **. Men were the descendants of
Titans, who had killed and dismembered the
young Dionysos-Zagreus; the weight of this
crime oppressed-them. A fragment of Anax-
imander says that the unity of the world was
destroyed by a primordial crime and every-
thing that issued from it must carry on the
punishment for this erime®®. Although the
features of banding together, killing, and dis-
membering as expressed in the deed of the
Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice
described by St Nilus—as also many other
myths of antiquity, for example, the death of
Orpheus himself—we are nevertheless disturbed
here by the variation according to which a
youthful god was murdered.

In the Christian myth man’s original sin is
undoubtedly an offence against God the Father,
and if Christ redeems mankind from the weight
of original sin by sacrificing his own life, he
forces us to the conclusion that this sin was
murder. According to the law of retaliation
which is deeply rooted in human fecling, a mur-
der ean be atoned only by the sacrifice of
another life ; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-

4 einnah, Cult, Mylien, & Religions, Ty p. 7
£0 “Uno sorte do p&che proethnique,” Le,

256 TOTEM AND TABOO

guilt °°. And if this sacrifice of one’s own life
brings about a reconciliation with god, the
father, then the crime which must be expiated
can only have been the murder of the father.
Thus in the Christian doctrine mankind most
unreservedly acknowledges the guilty deed of
primordial times because it now has found the
~ most complete expiation for this deed in the
sacrificial death of the son. ‘I'he reconciliation
with the father is the more thorough because
simultaneously with this sacrifice there follows
the complete renunciation of woman, for whose
sake mankind rebelled against the father. But
now also the psychological fatality of ambival-
ence, demands its rights. In the same deed
which offers the greatest possible cxpiation to
the father, the son also attains the goal of his
wishes against the father. He becomes a god
himself beside or rather in place of his fathcr.
The religion of the son suceceds the religion of
the father. As a sign of this substitution the
old totem feast is revived again in the form of
communion in which the band of brothers now
eats the flesh and blood of the son and no longer
that of the father, the sons thereby identifying
themselves with him and becoming holy them-
selves. ‘Thus through the ages we see the iden-

8° The suicidal impulsos of our nouroties regularly prove to bo
self-punishmenta for death wishes directed against others,

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 257

tity of the totem feast with the animal sacrifice,
the theanthropic human sacrifice, and the
Christian eucharist, and in all these solemn
occasions we recognize the after-effects of that
crime which so oppressed men but of which they
must have beenso proud. At bottom, however,
the Christian communion is a new setting aside
of the father, a repetition of the crime that
must be expiated. We sce how well justified
is Frazer’s dictum that “‘ the Christian commun-
ion has absorbed within itself a sacrament
which is doubtless far older than Christian-
ity 9,

7

A process like the removal of the primal
father by the band of brothers must have left
ineradicable traces in the history of mankind
and must have expressed itself the more fre-
quently in numérous substitutive formations
the less it itself was to be remembered.” Tam

% Eating the Ged, p. 51... . Nobody familiar with the litera-
ture on this subject will assume that the tracing back of the Chris-
tian communion to the totem feast is an idea of the author of this
book.
9 Ariel in The Tempest :

Full fathom five thy father lies :

Of his bones are coral made ;

‘Those aro pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sca-change

Into something rich and strange... .

258 TOTEM AND TABOO

avoiding the temptation of pointing out these
traces in mythology, where they are not hard to
find, and am turning to another field in follow-
ing a hint of S. Reinach in his suggestive treat-
ment of the death of Orpheus ®.

There is a situation in the history of Greek art
which is strikingly familiar even if profoundly
divergent, to the scene of a totem feast discov-
ered by Robertson Smith. It is the situation of
the oldest Greck tragedy. A group of persons,
all of the same name and dressed in the same
way, surround a single figure upon whose words
and actions they are dependent, to represent the
chorus and the original single impersonator of
the hero. Later developments created a second
and a third actor in order to represent opponents
in playing, and off-shoots of the hero, but the
character of the hero as well as his relation to
the chorus remains unchanged. The hero of the
tragedy had to suffer; this is to-day still the
essential content of a tragedy. He had taken
upon himself the so-called ‘tragic guilt’,
which is not always easy to explain ; it is often
not a guilt in the ordinary sense. Almost
always it consisted of a rebellion against a
divine or human authority and the chorus ac-
companied the hero with their sympathies,

% La Mort d’Orphöo, Cultes, Mythes, et Retigions, Vol, II, p.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 259

trying to restrain and warn him, and lamented
his fate after he had met with what was con-
sidered fitting punishment for his daring
attempt.

But why did the hero of the tragedy have to
suffer, and what was the meaning of his ‘ tragic”
guilt ? We will cut short the discussion by a
prompt answer. He had to suffer because he
was the primal father, the hero of that primor-
dial tragedy the repetition of which here serves
a certain tendency, and the tragic guilt is the
guilt which he had to take upon himself in order
to free the chorus of theirs. The scene upon
the stage came into being through purposive
distortion of the historical scene or, one is
tempted to say, it was the result of refined
hypocrisy. Actually, in the old situation, it
was the members of the chorus themselves who
had caused the suffering of the hero; here, on
the other hand, they exhaust themselves in
sympathy and regret, and the hero himself is to
blame for his suffering. The crime foisted upon.
him, namely, presumption and rebellion against
a great authority, is the same as that which in
the past oppressed the colleagues of the chorus,
namely, the band of brothers. ‘Thus the tragic
hero, though still against his will, is made the
redeemer of the chorus.

When one bears in mind the suffering of the

s.

260 TOTEM AND TABOO

divine goat Dionysos in the performance of the
Greek tragedy and the lament of the retinue of
goats who identified themselves with him, one
can easily understand how the almost extinet
drama was reviewed in the Middle Ages in the
Passion of Christ.

In closing this study, which has been carried
out in extremely condensed form, I want to
state the conclusion that the beginnings of reli-
gion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedi-
pus complex. This is in entire accord with the
findings of psychoanalysis, namely, that the
nucleus of all neuroses as far as our present
knowledge of them goes is the Oedipus complex.

It comes as a great surprise to me that these
problems of racial psychology can also be solved
through a single concrete instance, such as the
relation to the father. Perhaps another psycho-
logical problem must be included here. We
have so frequently had occasion to show the
ambivalence of emotions in its real sense, that
is to say the coincidence of love and hate to-
wards the same object, at the root of important
cultural formations. We know nothing about
the origin of this ambivalence. It may be
assumed to be a fundamental phenomenon of
our emotional life. But the other possibility
seems to me also worthy of consideration : that
ambivalence, originally foreign to our emotional

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 261

life, was acquired by mankind from the father
complex *, where psychoanalytic investigation
of the individual to-day still reveals the strong-
est expression of it °°.

Before closing we must take into account
that the remarkable convergence reached in
these illustrations, pointing to a single inclusive
relation, ought not to blind us to the uncertain-
ties of our assumptions and to the difficulties
of our conclusions. Of these difficulties I will
point out only two which must have forced
themselves upon many readers.

In the first place it ean hardly have escaped
any one that we base everything upon the
assumption of a psyche of the mass in which
psychic processes occur as in the psychic life of
the individual. Moreover, we let the sense of
guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years,
remaining effective in generations which could
not have known anything of this deed. We

% That is to say, the parent complex.

* Lam used to being misunderstood and therefore do not think
it superfluous to state clearly that in giving these deductions I
am by no means oblivious of the complex nature of the phenomena
which give rise to them ; the only claim made is that a new factor
has been added to the already known or still unrecognized origins
of religion, morality, and socicty, which was furnished through
‘psychoanalytic experience. ‘The synthesis of the whole explana-
tion must be left to another. But it is in the nature of this new
contribution that it could play none other than the central réle
in such a synthesis, although it will be necessary to overcome

great affective resistances before such importance will be con-
ceded to it.

262 TOTEM AND TABOO

allow an emotional process such as might have
arisen among generations of sons that had been
ill-treated by their fathers, to continue to new
generations which had escaped such treatment
by the very removal of the father. These seem
indeed to be weighty objections and any other
explanation which can avoid such assumptions
would seem to merit preference.

But further consideration shows that we our-
selves do not have to carry the whole responsi-
bility for such daring. Without the assump-
tion of a mass psyche, or a continuity in the
emotional life of mankind which permits us to
disregard the interruptions of psychic acts
through the transgression of individuals, social
psychology could not exist at all. If psychic
processes of one generation did not continue in
the next, if each had to acquire its attitude
towards life afresh, there would be no progress
in this field and almost no development. We
are now confronted by two new questions : how
much can be attributed to this psychic contin-
uity within the series of gencrations, and what
ways and means does a generation use to trans-
fer its psychic states to the next generation? I
do not claim that these problems have been
sufficiently explained or that direct communi-
cation and tradition, of which one immediately
thinks, are adequate for the task. Social

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 263

psychology is in general little concerned with
the manner in which the required continuity in
the psychic life of succeeding gencrations is
established. A part of the task seems to be per-
formed by the inheritance of psychic dispositions
which, however, need certain incentives in the
individual life in order to become effective. This
may be the meaning of the poct’s words : Strive
to possess yourself of what you have inherited
from your ancestors. The problem would
appear more difficult if we could admit that
there are psychic impulses which can be so
completely suppressed that they leave no traces
whatsoever behind them. But that does not
exist. The greatest suppression must leave
room for distorted substitutions and their
resulting reactions. But in that case we may
assume that no generation is capable of con-
cealing its more important psychic processes
from the next. For psychoanalysis has taught
us that in his unconscious psychic activity
every person possesses an apparatus which
enables him to interpret the reactions of others,
that is to say, to straighten out the distortions
which the other person has affected in the
expression of his feelings. By this method of
unconscious understanding of all customs, cere-
monies, and laws which the original relation to
the primal father had left behind, later genera-

264 TOTEM AND TABOO

tions may also have suceeeded in taking over
this legacy of feelings. 2

There is another objection which the analytic
method of thought itself might raise.

We have interpreted the first rules of morality
and moral restrictions of primitive society as
reactions to a deed which gave the authors of it
the conception of crime. ‘They regretted this
deed and decided that it should not be repeated
and that its execution must bring no gain.

This creative scnse of guilt _has not become

extinct with us. We find its asocial effects in
neuroties producing new rules of morality and
continued restrictions, in expiation for misdeeds
committed, or as precautions against misdeeds
to be committed.® But when we examine
these neurotics for the deeds which have called
forth such reactions, we are disappointed. We
do not find deeds, but only impulses and feel-
ings which sought evil but which were restrained
from carrying it out. “Only psychic realities
and not actual ones are at the basis of the neu-
rotics’ sense of guilt, It is characteristic of the
neurosis to put a psychic reality above an
actual one and to react as seriously to thoughts
as the normal person reacts only towards
realities.

May it not be true that the case was some-

® Compare Chapter II.

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 265

what the same with primitive men? We are
justified in ascribing to them an extraordinary
over-valuation of their psychic acts as a partial
manifestation of their narcistic organization ”.
According to this the mere impulses of hostility
towards the father and the existence of the
wish phantasy to kill and devour him may
have sufficed to bring about the moral reaction
which has created totémism and taboo. We
should thus escape the necessity of tracing back
the beginning of our cultural possession, of
which we rightly are so proud, to a horrible
crime which wounds all our feclings. The
causal connexion, which stretches from that
beginning to the present time, would not be im-
paired, for the psychic reality would be of suffi-
cient importance to account for all those conse-
quences. It may be agreed that a change has
really taken place in the form of socicty from
the father horde to the brother clan, This is a
strong argument, but it isnot conclusive. The
change might have been accomplished in a less
violent manner and still have conditioned the
appearance of the moral reaction. As long as the
pressure of the primal father was felt the hostile
feelings against him were justified and repent-
ance at these feelings had to wait for another

9" Seo Chapter III,

266 TOTEM AND TABOO

opportunity. Of as little validity is the second
objection, that everything derived from the
ambivalent relation to the father, namely
taboos, and rules of sacrifice, is characterized by
the highest seriousness and by complete reality.
The ceremonials and inhibitions of compulsion
neuroties exhibit this characteristic too and yet
they go back to a merely psychic reality, to
resolution and not to execution. We must be-
ware of introducing the contempt for what is
merely thought or wished which characterizes
our sober world where there are only material
values, into the world of primitive man and the
neurotic, which is full of inner riches only.

We face a decision here which is really not
easy. But let us begin by acknowledging that
the difference which may seem fundamental to
others does not, in our judgment, touch the
most important part of the subject. If wishes
and impulses have the full value of fact for
primitive man, it is for us to follow such a
conception intelligently instead of correcting it
according to our standard. But in that case we
must scrutinize more closely the prototype of the
neurosis itself which is responsible for having
raised this doubt. It is not true that compul-
sion neurotics, who to-day are under the pres-
sure of over-morality, defend themselves only
against the psychic reality of temptations and

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 267

punish themselves for impulses which they have
only felt. A piece of historic reality is also
involved ; in their childhood these persons had
nothing but evil impulses and as far as their
childish impotence permitted they put them
into action. Each of these over-good persons
had a period of badness in his childhood, and a
perverse phase as a fore-runner and a premise
of the latter over morality. The analogy be-
tween primitive men and neuroties is therefore
much more fundamentally established if we
assume that with the former, too, the psychic
reality, concerning whose structure there is no
doubt, originally coincided with the actual
reality, and that primitive men really did what
according to all testimony they intended to
do.

But we must not let our judgment about
primitive men be influenced too far by the an-
alogy with neurotics. Differences must also be
taken into account. Of course the sharp divi-
sion between thinking and doing as we draw it
does not exist either with savages or with neu-
rotics. But the neurotic is above all inhibited
in his actions; with him the thought is a com-
plete substitute for the deed. Primitive man is
not inhibited, the thought is directly converted
into the deed, the deed is for him so to speak
rather a substitute for the thought, and for that

268 TOTEM AND TABOO

reason I think we may well assume in the case
we are discussing, though without vouching for
the absolute certainty of the decision, that
“Tn the beginning was the deed”.

THE END

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