165

CHAPTER IV

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

The reader need not fear that psychoanalysis,
which first revealed the regular over-
determination of psychic 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 psy-
choanalyst.

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
place of religion among certain primitive races
in Australia, America, and Africa, and furnishes
the basis of social organization. We know that

166

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 number
of customs and usages in various old as well as
modern societies were to be taken as remnants
of a totemic 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:¹ “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
totémism in twelve articles, like a catechism of
the totemic religion:²

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

¹ p. 139.

² “Revue Scientifique,” October, 1900, reprinted in the four
volume work of the author, “Cultes, Mythes et Religions,” 1908,
Tome I, p. 17.

167

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

3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes re-
fers 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.

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

11. The totem animal foretells the future to

168

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 thorough
discussion of the problems they raise. We shall
remain indebted to J. G. Frazer, the author
of “Totemism and Exogamy,”³ for the pleasure
and information he affords, even though psy-
choanalytic investigation may lead us to results
which differ widely from his.⁴

³1910.

⁴But it may be well to show the reader beforehand how difficult
it is to establish the facts in this field.

169

“A totem,” wrote Frazer in his first essay,⁵
“is a class of material objects which a savage re-
gards with superstitious respect, believing that
there exists between him and every member of
the class an intimate and altogether special rela-
tion. The connection between a person and his

In the first place those who collect the observations are not
identical with those who digest and discuss them; the first are
travelers and missionaries, while the others are scientific men who
perhaps have never seen the objects 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 not 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 Australian Aborigines,” Fortnightly Review, 1905,
“Totemism and Exogamy,” Vol. I, p. 150).—It must not be for-
gotten that primitive 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 contrary, that far-reaching changes in all directions have
taken place among primitive races, so that we can never unhes-
itatingly 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 the original conditions, therefore,
always remains a 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 in-
clined to interpret their acts and feelings according to our own
psychic constellations.

⁵“Totemism,” Edinburgh, 1887, reprinted in the first volume of
his great study, “Totemism and Exogamy.”

170

totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects
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 gen-
eration,

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 of compara-
tively 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
veneration of a group of men and women who
take their name from the totem and consider
themselves consanguinous offspring of a com-

171

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 members
of the clan towards each other and towards other
tribes. In the later history of totemism these
two sides show a tendency to part company; 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 has disappeared. In the
present state of our ignorance about the origin
of totemism we cannot say with certainty how
these two sides were originally 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 be-
comes that a member of a tribe looks upon him-
self as being of the same genus as his totem and
makes no distinction between his attitude to-
wards 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

172

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 eating 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.⁶

Specimens of the totem animals are sometimes
raised by the clan and taken care of in cap-
tivity.⁷ 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 pre-
scribed ritual of excuses and ceremonies of ex-
piation.

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

⁶Compare the chapter on Taboo.

⁷Just as to-day we still have the wolves in a cage at the steps of
the Capitol in Rome and the bears in the pit at Berne.

173

son 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.⁸

A member of a clan seeks to emphasize his re-
lationship to the totem in various significant
ways; he imitates an exterior similarity by dress-
ing himself in the skin of the totem animal, by
having the picture of it tattooed upon himself,
and in other ways. On the solemn occasions of
birth, initiation into manhood or funeral obse-
quies 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.⁹

The social side of totemism is primarily ex-
pressed in a sternly observed commandment and
in a tremendous restriction. The members of
a totem clan are brothers and sisters, pledged to

⁸Like the legend of the white woman in many noble families.

⁹l. c., p. 45.–See the discussion of sacrifice further on.

174

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 de-
mand 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 inheritance possibly not
counting at all in the beginning.

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 connection 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 entirely
comprehensible as a security against incest in
group marriages, and that at first it accomplishes
the avoidance of incest for the younger genera-
tion and only in the course of further develop-
ment becomes a hindrance to the older genera-
tion as well.¹⁰

To this presentation of totemism by Frazer,

¹⁰ See Chapter I,

175

one of the earliest in the litera-
ture on the subject, 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:¹¹ “The totem animal is con-
sidered the ancestral animal. ‘Totem’ is there-
fore 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
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

¹¹ p. 116.

176

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
eat 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 connection,
namely, that under certain conditions there was
a kind of ceremonial consumption of the totem
flesh. ...”

“... 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
rules 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
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

177

amounts to the same thing) ; members of a totem
were forbidden to have sexual intercourse with
each other.¹²

It may now seem strange to us that in the
Code du totémisme 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 oc-
cupy our attention.

2

The more convinced we became that totemism
had regularly formed a phase of every culture,

¹²The conclusion which Frazer draws about totemism in his
second work on the subject (“The Origin of Totemism,” Fort-
night Review, 1899) agrees with this text: “Thus, totemism has
commonly been treated as a primitive system both of religion and
of society. As a system of religion it embraces the mystic union
of 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
corresponding 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.”

178

the more urgent became the necessity of arriving
at an understanding of it and of casting light
upon the riddle of its nature. To be sure, every-
thing 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 in-
cest 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 Frazer him-
self, who has repeatedly changed his view on the
subject.¹³

¹³In connection 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 enquirer

179

It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism
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 Andrew
Lang, that even primitive races have not pre-
served these original forms and the conditions
of their origin, so that we are altogether depend-
ent upon hypotheses to take the place of the
observation we lack.¹⁴ Among the attempted
explanations some seem inadequate from the
very beginning in the judgment of the psycholo-
gist. 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 bet-
ter be subjected to another interpretation. The
refutation of these various opinions as a rule
hardly presents any difficulties; 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 sur--

should shift his colours with the shifting colours of the ground he
treads.” Preface to Vol. I, “Totemism and Exogamy,” 1910.

¹⁴“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 abso-
lutely primitive man, and a totemic system in the making,” p. 29.

180

a) THE ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM

prising that most of the new literature on the
subject, which we have largely omitted here,
shows the unmistakable effort to reject a gen-
eral solution of totemic problems as unfeasible.
(See, for instance, B. Goldenweiser in the Jour-
nal of American Folklore XXIII, 1910. Re-
viewed in the Britannica Year Book 1913.) I
have taken the liberty of disregarding the
chronological order in stating these contra-
dictory hypotheses.

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? ¹⁵

The Scotchman, MacLennan, who discovered
totemism and exogamy for science,¹⁶ refrained
from publishing his views of the origin of totem-
ism. According to a communication of Andrew
Lang ¹⁷ he was for a time inclined to trace totem-
ism back to the custom of tattooing. I shall di-
vide the accepted theories of the derivation of

¹⁵At first probably only animals.

¹⁶“The Worship of Animals and Plants,” Fortnightly Review,
1869–1870. “Primitive Marriage,” 1865; both works reprinted in
“Studies in Ancient History,” 1876; second edition, 1886.

¹⁷“The Secret of the Totem,” 1905, p. 34.

181

totemism into three groups, α) nominalistic, β)
sociological, γ) psychological.

a) The Nominalistic Theories

The information about these theories will jus-
tify 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 themselves from each other
by means of names.¹⁸ 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, fam-
ilies and tribes wanted to differentiate them-
selves.¹⁹

Max Müller expresses the same opinion about
the meaning of the totem in his “Contributions to
the Science of Mythology.”²⁰ A totem is said to
be, 1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name, 3. the
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-

¹⁸Ibid.

¹⁹Ibid.

²⁰According to Andrew Lang.

182

nent name for communities and individuals that
could be preserved in writing. … Thus totem-
ism arises, not from a religious, but from a pro-
saic 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.²¹
Herbert Spencer,²² also, thought that the
origin of totemism was to be found in the giving
of names. The attributes of certain individuals,
he showed, had brought about their being named
after animals so that they had come to have
names of honor or nicknames which continued in
their descendants. As a result of the indef-
initeness and incomprehensibility of primitive
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.
Lord Avebury (better known under his for-
mer name, Sir John Lubbock) has expressed

²¹Pikler and Somló, “The Origin of Totemism,” 1901. The au-
thors rightly call their attempt at explanation a “Contribution to
the materialistic theory of History.”

²²“The Origin of Animal Worship,” Fortnightly Review, 1870.
“Principles of Psychology,” Vol. I, paragraphs 169 to 176.

183

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 an-
cestral name. In this way it came about that
the animal itself came to be respected and finally
venerated.

Fison has advanced what seems an irrefutable
objection to such a derivation of the totem name
from the names of individuals.²³ He shows
from conditions in Australia that the totem is
always the mark of a group of people and never
of an individual. But if it were otherwise, 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 to-
temic system. The most noteworthy theory of
this group has been developed by Andrew Lang
in his books, Social Origins, 1903, and The

²³Kamilaroi and Kurmai, p. 165, 1880 (Lang, “Secret of the
Totem,” etc.).

184

Secret of the Totem, 1905. This theory still
makes naming the center 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 importance 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,²⁴ 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 per-
haps a part of his psyche. The fact that they had
the same names as animals must have led primi-
tive men to assume a secret and important bond
between their persons and the particular animal
species. What other bond than consanguinity
could it be? But if the similarity of names once
led to this assumption it could also account di-

²⁴See the chapter on Taboo, p. 95.

185

rectly 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 connection between all bearers,
human and bestial, of the same name; and belief
in the blood superstitions—were needed to give
rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, in-
cluding 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 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

186

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 born, (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.

β) 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 de-
scent from the totem animal, once made the
casual remark that totemism seemed to him to
be nothing but “une hypertrophie de l’instinct
social.”²⁵

The same interpretation seems to permeate
the new work of E. Durkheim, Les formes
élémentaires de la vie religieuse; Le système
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.

Other authors have sought a more intimate
reason for the share which social impulses have
played in the formation of totemic institutions.

²⁵l. c., Vol. I, p. 41.

187

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 rôle with it. At the
same time this tribe would develop a special
familiarity with this animal, and a kind of in-
terest for it which, however, was based upon the
psychic motive of man’s most elementary and
pressing need, namely, hunger.²⁶

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 so-
cial scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how
such an exclusive diet could have developed an
almost religious relation to the totem, culminat-
ing in an absolute abstention from the preferred
food.

The first of the three theories about the origin
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-

²⁶Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association,
Belfast, 1902. According to Frazer, l. c., Vol. IV, p. 50.

188

portant publication by two investigators of the
inhabitants of Central Australia.²⁷

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 explain
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 individually
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.

3. 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
totem. (This ceremony is called Intichiuma.)

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

²⁷“The Native Tribes of Central Australia” by Baldwin Spencer and H. J. Gillen, London, 1891.

189

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

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
married no other women except those of their own
totem. Secondly, the apparent disregard of the
sexual act in their theory of conception. People
who had 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 Intichiuma
ceremony to explain totemism, suddenly saw the
totemic system in a totally different light as a
thoroughly practical organization for accom-
plishing the most natural needs of man. (Com-
pare Haddon above.²⁸⁾) The system was simply

²⁸⁾There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that
metaphysical haze which some writers love to conjure up over the

190

an extraordinary piece of “coöperative magic.”
Primitive men formed what might be called a
magic production and consumption club. Each
totem clan undertook to see to the cleanliness 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 efforts 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 fur-
nished 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 com-
mandment to supply as much as possible of the
edible totem for the needs of others.

Frazer accepted the tradition of the Aruntas
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

humblest beginnings of human speculation but which is utterly
foreign to the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes of the savage.
(“Totemism and Exogamy,” I., p. 117.)

191

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

insure the totem for others while they themselves
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 endeavor to make the
being favorably disposed by sparing it. Frazer
did not conceal the difficulties of this explana-
tion from himself,²⁹ nor did he dare to indicate
in what way the habit of marrying within the
totem, which the myths of the Aruntas pro-
claimed, was converted into exogamy.

Frazer’s theory based on the Intichiuma,
stands and 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 Durkheim³⁰ and
Lang.³¹ The Aruntas seem on the contrary to
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

²⁹l. c., p. 120.

³⁰“L’année Sociologique,” Vol. I, V, VIII, and elsewhere. See
especially the chapter, “Sur le Totemisme,” Vol. V, 1901.

³¹“Social Origins and the Secret of the Totem.”

192

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.

γ) 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.”³² 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 totemism
from the belief in souls.

When he became acquainted with the obser-
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-
 

³²“The Golden Bough,” II, p. 332.

193

zation for it which was altogether too complicated
to be called primitive.³³ The magic coöperative
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 superstition behind
these forms. He then found this original factor
in the remarkable conception theory of the
Aruntas.

As already stated, the Aruntas establish no
connection between conception and the sexual
act. If a 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
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

³³“It is unlikely that a community of savages should deliber-
ately parcel out the realm of nature in provinces, assign each
province to a 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. IV, p. 57.

194

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 eat 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 totemism. W. H.
R. Rivers’ observations among the inhabitants
of the Bank Islands seemed to prove men’s di-
rect identification with their totems on the basis
of such a conception theory.³⁴

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 rôle 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-
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

³⁴“Totemism and Exogamy,” II, p. 89, and IV, p. 59.

195

mother might easily be identified by her with the
child in her womb. Such maternal fancies, so
natural and seemingly so universal, appear to be
the root of totemism.³⁵

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 honor the ancestral spirits.³⁶ Though
they raise the myth of immaculate conception
through a spirit to a general theory of concep-
tion, we cannot for that reason credit them with
ignorance as to the conditions of procreation any
more than we could the old races who lived dur-
ing the rise of the Christian myths.

Another psychological theory of the origin of
totemism has been formulated by the Dutch
writer, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a con-
nection between totemism and the migration of
souls. “The animal into which, according to
general belief, the souls of the dead passed, be-

³⁵“Totemism and Exogamy,” IV, p. 63.

³⁶“That belief is a philosophy far from primitive,” Andrew
Lang, “Secret of the Totem,” p. 192.

196

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.³⁷

Still another theory of totemism is advanced
by the excellent American ethnologists, Franz
Boas, Hill-Tout, and others. It is based on
observations of totemic Indian tribes and asserts
that the totem 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 difficulties which the derivation
of totemism through inheritance from a single
individual offers; besides, the Australian obser-
vations seem by no means to support the tracing
back of the totem to the guardian spirit.³⁸

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
corresponded to animals which had a soul.³⁹
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

³⁷Frazer, “Totemism and Exogamy,” IV, p. 45.

³⁸Frazer, l. c., p. 48.

³⁹Wundt, “Elemente der Völker Psychologie,” p. 190.

197

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

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) The Origin of Exogamy and Its Re-
lation 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 lib-
erty of further condensing the other questions
that arise. The discussions about the exogamy
of totem races become especially complicated
and untractable, one 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 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 explanations
of totemism lack all connection with exogamy
so that the two institutions are entirely separ-
 

198

ated. Thus we find here two opposing views,
one of which clings to the original likelihood that
exogamy is an essential part of the totemic sys-
tem while the other disputes such a connection
and believes in an accidental combination of these
two traits of the most ancient cultures. In his
later works Frazer has emphatically stood for
this latter point of view.
“I must request the reader to bear constantly
in mind that the two institutions of totemism and
exogamy are fundamentally distinct in origin
and nature though they have accidentally crossed
and blended in many tribes.” (Totemism 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 ⁴⁰ has shown in his writ-
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 menstruation)
forbids sexual intercourse with a woman of the

⁴⁰“L’année Sociologique,” 1898–1904.

199

same totem.⁴¹ 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.⁴² The general totem taboo which, for in-
stance, forbids any one to sit in the shadow of the
totem tree, would have sufficed. Andrew Lang
also contends for another 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.⁴³

Among the theories which seek to explain
exogamy independently of totemism only a few
need be mentioned in so far as they illustrate
different attitudes of the authors towards the
problem of incest.

MacLennan ⁴⁴ had ingeniously guessed that
exogamy resulted from the remnants of customs
pointing to earlier forms of female rape. He
assumed that it was the general custom in an-

⁴¹See Frazer’s “Criticism of Durkheim, Totemism and Exog-
amy,” p. 101.

⁴²“Secret,” etc., p. 125.

⁴³See Frazer, l. c. IV, p. 75: “The totemic clan is a totally
different social organism from the exogamous class, and we have
good grounds for thinking that it is far older.”

⁴⁴“Primitive Marriage,” 1865.

200

cient times to procure women from strange
tribes so that marriage with a woman from the
same tribe gradually became “improper because
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 investigating
whether actual conditions corroborate MacLen-
nan’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 themselves, as well as in the man-
ner in which the incest problem is here entirely
neglected.⁴⁵

Other writers have on the contrary assumed,
and evidently with more right, that exogamy is
to be interpreted as an institution for the pre-
vention of incest.⁴⁶

If we survey the gradually increasing compli-
cation of Australian marriage restrictions we
can hardly help agreeing with the opinion of
Morgan, Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer,⁴⁷
that these institutions bear the stamp of “deliber-
ate design,” as Frazer puts it, and that they were

⁴⁵Frazer, l. c., p. 73 to 92.

⁴⁶Compare Chapter I.

⁴⁷Morgan, “Ancient Society,” 1877.—Frazer, “Totemism and
Exogamy,” IV, p. 105.

201

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

meant to do what they have actually accom-
plished. “In no other way does it seem possible
to explain in all its details a system at once so
complex and so regular.”⁴⁸

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 exogamy?
It evidently does not suffice to appeal to an
instinctive aversion against sexual intercourse
with blood relatives, that is to say, to the fact of
incest dread, in order to explain the 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 experience of history
can acquaint us with cases in which incestuous
marriage of privileged persons was made the
rule.

⁴⁸Frazer, l. c., p. 106.

202

Westermarck ⁴⁹ 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
consanguinous, 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 his “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 attraction
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-
thistic excitement required to produce sexual
tuminescence.”

⁴⁹“Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions,” Vol. II,
“Marriage,” 1909. See also there the author’s defense against
familiar objections.

203

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

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 af-
fect 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.

“It 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

204

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 crimes, 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 incest we ought rather to
assume that there is a natural instinct in favor
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.”⁵⁰

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

⁵⁰ l. c., p. 97.

205

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

play a rôle 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, the assumption 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.⁵¹
Not only must the prohibition of incest be older
than all breeding of domestic animals 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 difficulty.
Besides, everything that we know about con-
temporaneous savages makes it very improbable
that the thoughts of their far-removed ancestors
should already have been occupied with pre-
venting injury to their later descendants. It
sounds almost ridiculous to attribute hygienic
and eugenic motives such as have hardly yet
found consideration in our culture, to these

⁵¹Compare Durkheim, „La prohibition de l’inceste.“ „L’année
Sociologique,“ I, 1896–97.

206

children of the race who lived without thought
of the morrow.⁵²

And finally it must be pointed out that a pro-
hibition against inbreeding as an element weak-
ening to the race, 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,⁵³ 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’s resigned statement, namely,
that we do not know the origin of incest dread
and do not even know how to guess at it. None
of the solutions of the riddle thus far advanced
seems satisfactory to us.⁵⁴

I must mention another attempt to explain the

⁵²Charles Darwin says about savages: “They are not likely to
reflect on distant evils to their progeny.”

⁵³See Chapter I.

⁵⁴“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 dark as ever.” “Totemism and Exogamy,” I,
p. 165.

207

origin of incest dread which is of an entirely
different nature from those considered up to
now. It might be called a 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 promis-
cuous 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 originally lived
in small communities, each with a single wife, or
if powerful with several, whom he jealously de-
fended against all other men. Or he may not
have been a social animal and yet have lived with
several wives, like the gorilla; 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.

208

V, 1845–47). The younger males being thus
driven out and wandering about would also, when
at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too
close inbreeding within the limits of the same
family.”⁵⁵

Atkinson⁵⁶ seems to have been the first to rec-
ognize 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 Lang⁵⁷ declared himself in agree-
ment with this explanation of exogamy. But
in the same book he advocates the other theory of
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 case exogamy would have existed before

⁵⁵“The Origin of Man,” Vol. II, Chapter 20, pp. 603–604.
⁵⁶“Primal Law,” London, 1903 (with Andrew Lang, “Social
Origins”).
⁵⁷“Secret of the Totem, pp. 114, 143.

209

totemism; in the second case it would be a con-
sequence of it.⁵⁸

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-
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.

⁵⁸“If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the
lines of Mr. Darwin’s theory, before the totem beliefs 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, become habitual, would be, “No mar-
riages within the local group.” Next let the local groups receive
names such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rule
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.” “Secret of the Totem,” p. 143.
(The italics above are mine).–In his last expression on the sub-
ject, (“Folklore,” December, 1911) Andrew Lang states, however,
that he has given up the derivation of exogamy out of the “gen-
eral totemic” taboo,

210

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 in-
dividual of this species. There results the clini-
cal picture of an animal phobia, which is one of
the most frequent among the psychoneurotic dis-
eases of this age and perhaps the earliest 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 strikingly 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 sel-
dom possible to learn the manner in which such
an unusual choice of anxiety has been brought
about. I am indebted to Dr. Karl Abraham
for the report of a case in which the child itself
explained its fear of wasps by saying that the
color 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.

211

The animal phobias have not yet been made
the object of careful analytical investigation,
although they very much merit it. The difficul-
ties of analyzing 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. But a number of such phobias di-
rected against larger animals have proved acces-
sible to analysis and have thus betrayed their
secret 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 psychoanalysis
has undoubtedly seen such cases and has received
the same impression from them. But I can re-
fer 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 scat-
tered observation. For instance I mention an
author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has very in-
telligently occupied himself with the neuroses of
childhood. He 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:

212

‘Dear dog, don’t touch me, I will be good.’ ”
By “being good” he meant “not to play violin
any more” (to practice onanism).^58a

The same author later sums up as follows:
“His dog phobia is really his fear of the father
displaced upon the dog, for his peculiar 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 domes-
tic 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
five-year-old Boy” ⁵⁹ 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 proved that this was meant to be

^58aM. Wulff, “Contributions to Infantile Sexuality,” Zentralbl.
f. Psychoanalyze, 1912, II, Nr. I, p. 15.

⁵⁹“Little Hans,” translated by A. A. Brill, Moffat, Yard & Co.

213

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 content 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 favor 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 par-
ents 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 totemism, namely, that
under such conditions the child displaces a part
of its feelings 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-
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 admiration
which he had felt for his father from the begin-
ning, so that the child assumed a double or am-
bivalent emotional attitude towards the father
and relieved himself of this ambivalent conflict

214

by displacing his hostile and anxious feelings
upon a substitute for the father. The displace-
ment could not, however, relieve the conflict by
bringing about a smooth division between the
tender and the hostile feelings. On the con-
trary, the conflict was continued in reference 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 him-
self with the feared animal; he jumped around
like a horse, and now it was he who bit the
father.⁶⁰ In another stage of solution of the
phobia he did not scruple to identify his parents
with other large animals.⁶¹

We may venture the impression that certain
traits of totemism return as a negative expres-
sion in these animal phobias of children. But
we are indebted to S. Ferenczi for a beautiful
individual observation of what must be called
a case of positive totemism in the child.⁶² It is
true that with the little Arpád, whom Ferenczi
reports, the totemic interests do not awaken in
direct connection with the Oedipus complex, but
on the basis of a narcissistic premise, namely, the

⁶⁰l. c., p. 41.

⁶¹“The Phantasy of the Giraffe,” l. c., p. 30.

⁶²S. Ferenczi, “Contributions to Psychoanalysis,” p. 204, trans-
lated by Ernest Jones, R. G. Badger, Boston, 1916.

215

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

fear of castration. But whoever looks atten-
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. In the Oedipus as well as in the castration
complex the father plays the same rôle of feared
opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Cas-
tration and its substitute through blinding is the
punishment he threatens.⁶³

When little Arpád was two and a half years
old he once tried, while at a summer resort,
to urinate into the chicken coop, and on this
occasion 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 inter-
ested only in the chicken coop and in every-
thing that occurred there, and gave up human
speech for 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
something about poultry. His behavior to-
wards his totem animal was subtly ambivalent,
expressing itself in immoderate hating and

⁶³Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank and
Eder about the substitution of blindness in the Oedipus myth for
castration. Intern. Zeitschrift f. ärzte. Psychoanalyse, 1913, I,
No. 2.

216

loving. He loved best to play killing chickens.
“The slaughtering of poultry was quite a festi-
val for him. He could dance around the ani-
mals’ bodies for hours at a time in a state of
intense excitement.”⁶⁴ But then he kissed and
stroked the slaughtered animal, and cleaned and
caressed the chicken effigies which he himself had
ill-used.

Arpád 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
received them on account of onanistic preoccupa-
tion 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 activity
between cock and hen, the laying of eggs and the
creeping out of the young brood”⁶⁵ satisfied his
sexual curiosity which really was directed to-
wards human family life. His object wishes

⁶⁴Ferenczi, l. c., p. 209.

⁶⁵Ferenczi, l. c., p. 212.

217

have been formed on the model of chicken life
when we find him saying to a woman neighbor:
“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,⁶⁶ 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 totemic sys-
tem 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 ethnologists 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 totemism.⁶⁷

⁶⁶Frazer finds that the essence of totemism is in this identifica-
tion: “Totemism is an identification of a man with his totem.”
“Totemism and Exogamy,” IV, p. 5.

⁶⁷I am indebted to Otto Rank for the report of a case of dog
phobia in an intelligent young man whose explanation of how he

218

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 succeed in making it prob-
able that the totemic system resulted from the
conditions underlying the Oedipus complex, just
as the animal phobia of “little John” and the
poultry perversion of “little Arpád” resulted
from it. In order to trace this possibility we
shall in what follows study a peculiarity of the
totemic system or, as we may say, of the totemic
religion, which until now could hardly be brought
into the discussion.

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 pregnancy had been frightened
by a dog.

219

4

W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was
a physicist, philologist, Bible critic, and archæ-
ologist, a many-sided as well as keen and free
thinking man, expressed the assumption in his
work on the “Religion of the Semites,”⁶⁸ pub-
lished in 1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the so-
called totem 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. D.; 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.

I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s ex-
cellent book⁶⁹ those statements about the origin
and meaning of the sacrificial rite 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

⁶⁸“The Religion of the Semites,” Second Edition, London, 1907.
⁶⁹W. Robertson Smith, “The Religion of the Semites,” 2d Edi-
tion, London, 1907.

220

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 rôle in all religions,
so that its origin must be traced back to very
general causes whose effects were everywhere the
same.

But the sacrifice–the holy action κατέξοχη
(sacrificium ἱερουργία)–originally meant some-
thing different from what later times understood
by it: the offering to the deity in order to recon-
cile him or to incline him to be favorable. 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 worshipers.”

Things to eat and drink were brought as sacri-
fice; man offered to his god the same things on
which he himself lived, flesh, cereals, fruits, wine
and oil. Only in regard to the sacrificial flesh
did there exist restrictions and exceptions. The
god partakes of the animal sacrifices with his
worshipers 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

221

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 used later as a
substitute for the blood. Primitive man looked
upon wine as the “blood of the 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 and
blood the god and his worshipers ate together.
It was essential that both participants should
receive their share 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 public affair, religious duty
was a part of the social obligation. Sacrifice
and festival go together among all races, each

222

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 eating gave direct expression to
the fact that the god and his worshipers 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 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 repeti-
tion to strengthen it and make it endure.

But why is this binding power ascribed to

223

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

eating and drinking in common? In the most
primitive societies there is only one unconditional
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 signifies 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 eaten later through which the
body is renewed, can acquire and strengthen
kinship. If one shared a meal with one’s god
the conviction was thus expressed that one was
of the same substance as he, no meal was there-
fore 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

224

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 relig-
ious 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 sig-
nificant, no animal was slaughtered except for
such a solemn occasion. Without any hesita-
tion the people ate fruits, game and the milk of
domestic animals, but religious scruples made it
impossible for the individual to kill a domestic
animal for his own use. There is not the least
doubt, says Robertson Smith, that every sacri-
fice was originally a clan sacrifice, and that the
killing of a sacrificial animal originally belonged
to those acts which were forbidden to the indi-
vidual and were only justified if the whole kin
assumed the responsibility. Primitive men had
only one class of actions which were thus charac-
terized, namely, actions which touched the holi-

225

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

ness of the kin’s common blood. A life which no
individual might take and which could be sacri-
ficed 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 execu-
tion of a guilty member of the kin must be
performed by the whole kin. In other words:
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 forbidden 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 origin-
ally identified with the gods themselves and that
at the sacrifice the worshipers in some way em-
phasized their blood relationship to the god and
to the animal. But this difference between usual
and “mystic” sacrifices does not hold good for

226

still earlier times. Originally all animals were
holy, their meat was forbidden and might be
eaten only on solemn occasions, with the partici-
pation of the whole kin. The slaughter of the
animal amounted to the spilling of the kin’s
blood and had to be done with the same precau-
tions 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.⁷⁰ But such holiness as still clung
to domestic animals in what was now a “pas-
toral” religion, is sufficiently distinct for us
to recognize its totemic character. Even in late
classical times the rite in several localities pre-
scribed flight for the sacrificer after the 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 summoned, was instituted after
the sacrifice. Finally 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 necessary

⁷⁰“The inference is that the domestication to which totemism
leads (when there are any animals capable of domestication) is
fatal to totemism.” Jevons, “An Introduction to the History of
Religion,” 1911, fifth edition, p. 120.

227

to kill it from time to time in solemn conclave,
and to divide its flesh and blood among the mem-
bers of the clan. The motive which commands
this act reveals the deepest meaning of the es-
sence of sacrifice. We have heard that in later
times every eating in common, the participation
in the same substance which entered into their
bodies, established a holy bond between the com-
municants; in oldest times this meaning seemed
to be attached only to participation in the sub-
stance 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.⁷¹⁾

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

⁷¹⁾l. c., p. 313.

228

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 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 eating 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

229

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

in the desert of Sinai towards the end of the
fourth century A. D. 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 accompani-
ment 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 palpitating 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 sacrifice,
which in later times underwent the most varied
modifications.

Many authors have refused to grant any
weight to this conception of the totem feast be-
cause it could not be strengthened by direct ob-
servation 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 Aztecs
and others which recall the conditions of the
totem feast, the bear sacrifices of the bear tribe

230

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.⁷² An Indian tribe in California
which reveres the buzzard, a large bird of prey,
kills it once a year with solemn ceremony, where-
upon the bird is mourned and its skin and feath-
ers preserved. The Zuni Indians in New
Mexico do the same thing with their holy turtle.

In the Intichiuma ceremonies of Central Aus-
tralian tribes a trait has been observed which fits
in excellently with the assumptions of Robertson
Smith. Every tribe that practices magic for
the increase of its totem, which it cannot eat
itself, is bound to eat a part of its totem 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 connection with the burial
ceremony of this tribe.⁷³

But we shall follow Robertson Smith in the
assumption that the sacramental killing and the
common consumption of the otherwise forbidden

⁷²“The Golden Bough,” Part V, “Spirits of the Corn and of the
Wild,” 1912, in the chapters: “Eating the God and Killing the
Divine Animal.”

⁷³Frazer, “Totem and Exogamy,” Vol. II, p. 590.

231

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

totem animal was an important trait of the totem
religion.⁷⁴

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 occasion kills its totem in a
cruel manner and eats 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 movement 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 through the par-
ticipation of all, so that no one is allowed to ex-
clude himself from the killing and the feast.
After the act is accomplished the murdered ani-
mal is bewailed and lamented. The death la-
mentation is compulsive, being enforced by the
fear of a threatening retribution, and its main
purpose is, as Robertson Smith remarks on an
analogous occasion, to exculpate oneself from
responsibility for the slaying.⁷⁵

⁷⁴I am not ignorant of the objections to this theory of sacrifice
as expressed by Marillier, Hubert, Mauss and others, but they
have not essentially impaired the theories of Robertson Smith.

⁷⁵“Religion of the Semites,” 2nd Edition, 1907, p. 412.

232

But after this mourning there follows loud
festival gaiety 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 a permitted, or rather a prescribed
excess, a solemn violation of a prohibition. Peo-
ple do not commit the excesses which at all times
have characterized holidays, as a result of an or-
der to be in a holiday mood, but because in the
very nature of a holiday there is excess; the holi-
day 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 slay-
ing of the totem, which is otherwise forbidden
to them, why do they also mourn it?

We have heard that members of a clan become
holy through the consumption of the totem and
thereby also strengthen their identification with
it and with each other. The fact 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 substitute for the father,
and this really explains the contradiction that it
is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that

233

the killing of it results in a holiday and that the
animal is killed and yet mourned. The ambiva-
lent 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 phantastic but which has the
advantage of establishing an unexpected unity
among a series of hitherto separated phenomena.

The Darwinian conception of the primal horde
does not, of course, allow for the beginnings of
totemism. There is only a violent, jealous
father who keeps all the females for himself and
drives away the growing sons. This primal
state of society has nowhere been observed. The
most primitive organization we know, which to-
day is still in force with certain tribes, is associa-
tions of men consisting of members with equal
rights, subject to the restrictions of the totemic
system, and founded on matriarchy, or descent
through the mother.⁷⁶ Can the one have re-
 

⁷⁶For a recent contribution compare, “The Whole House of The
Chilkat,” by G. T. Emmons, American Museum Journal, Vol.
XVI, No. 7. (Translator.)

234

sulted 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 ⁷⁷ 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 vic-
tim. This violent primal father had surely been
the envied and feared model for each of the
brothers. Now they accomplished their identi-
fication with him by devouring him and each
acquired a part of his strength. The totem
feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebra-
tion, would be the repetition and commemoration
of this memorable, criminal act with which so
many things began, social organization, moral
restrictions and religion.⁷⁸

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

⁷⁸ The seemingly 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 conditions 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 their impubescence they are, but they would, when
strength was gained with time, inevitably wrench by combined

235

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 content of 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.

attacks renewed again and again, both wife and life from the
paternal tyrant” (“Primal Law,” pp. 220–221): Atkinson, who
spent his life in New Caledonia and had unusual opportunities to
study the natives, also refers to the fact that the conditions of
the primal horde which Darwin assumes can easily be observed
among herds of wild cattle and horses and regularly lead to the
killing of the father animal. He then assumes further that a
disintegration of the horde took place after the removal of the
father through embittered fighting among the victorious sons,
which thus precluded the origin of a new 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 psychoanalysis at his command and did
not know the studies of Robertson Smith, finds a less violent
transition from the primal horde to the next social stage in which
many men live together in peaceful accord. He attributes it to
maternal love that at first only the youngest sons and later others
too remain in the horde, who in return for this toleration ac-
knowledge the sexual prerogative of the father by the restraint
which they practice towards the mother and towards their sisters.

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

236

TOTEM AND TABOO

After they had satisfied their hate by his removal
and had carried out their wish for identification
with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to
assert themselves.⁷⁹ This took place in the form
of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed which
coincided here with the remorse generally 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 father’s presence
had formerly prevented they themselves now
prohibited in the psychic situation of “subsequent
obedience” which we know so well from psycho-
analysis. 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 funda-
mental 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.⁸⁰

⁷⁹This 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 favor-
able to moral reaction than success.

⁸⁰“Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the
sacred law of blood are in primitive society the only crimes of

237

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 nothing
in reality could make up for this. But the other,
the incest prohibition, had, besides, a strong prac-
tical foundation. Sexual need does not unite
men, it separates them. Though the brothers
had joined forces in order to overcome the father,
each was the other’s rival among the women.
Each one wanted to have them all to himself like
the father, and in the fight of each against the
other the new organization would have perished.
For there was no longer any one stronger than
all the rest who could have successfully assumed
the rôle of the father. Thus there was nothing
left for the brothers, if they wanted to live
together, but to erect the incest prohibition—per-
haps 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 probably
manifested themselves among them during the
which the community as such takes cognizance …¹⁾ ” “Religion of
the Semites,” p. 419.

¹⁾W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 3rd ed., London, 1927, p. 419.

238

time of their banishment. Perhaps this situa-
tion also formed the germ of the institution of
the mother right discovered by Bachofen, which
was then abrogated by the patriarchal family ar-
rangement.

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
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 totemic system was a kind of agreement
with the father in which the latter granted every-
thing that the child’s phantasy could expect from
him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return
for which the pledge was given to honor his life,
that is to say, not to repeat the act against the
totem through which the real father had per-
ished. 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.

239

In this connection 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 in-
jured 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 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 conditions
are entirely unfavorable to any kind of settle-
ment of these contradictory feelings. It is cer-
tainly noticeable that the ambivalence attached
to the father complex also continues in totemism
and in religions in general. The religion of
totemism included not only manifestations of
remorse and attempts at reconciliation, but also
serves to commemorate the triumph over the fa-
ther. The gratification obtained thereby creates
the commemorative celebration of the totem feast
at which the restrictions of subsequent obedience

240

are suspended, 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 prop-
erties, threaten to disappear as a result of the
changed influences of life. We shall not be sur-
prised to find that a part of the son’s defiance
also reappears, often in the most remarkable dis-
guises and inversions, in the formation of later
religions.

If thus far we have followed, in religion and
moral precepts–but little differentiated in to-
temism–the consequences of the tender impulses
towards the father as they are changed into re-
morse, we must not overlook the fact that for the
most part the tendencies which have impelled
to parricide have retained the victory. The so-
cial and fraternal feelings on which this great
change is based, henceforth for long periods
exercises the greatest influence upon the devel-
opment of society. They find expression in the
sanctification of the common blood and in the em-
phasis 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 established prohibition
against fratricide is now added to the prohibition

241

against killing the totem, which is based on re-
ligious grounds. It will still be a long time
before the commandment discards the restriction
to members of the tribe and assumes the simple
phraseology: 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-
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 totemic system and more in
accord with older conceptions, bids us argue for
an intimate connection 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.⁸¹

⁸¹Compare “Transformations and Symbols of the Libido,” by
C. G. Jung, in which some dissenting points of view are repre-
sented.

242

Robertson Smith has shown us that the old
totem feast returns in the original form of sac-
rifice. 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 supposed
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 eat-
ing 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, psychoanalytic
investigation of the individual teaches with es-
pecial emphasis that god is in every case modeled
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

243

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-
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 ani-
mal which had been sanctified through the god
was sacrificed to him.⁸² 3. The god was often
revered in the form of an animal, or from another
point of view, animals enjoyed a godlike rever-
ence long after the period of totemism. 4. In
myths the god is frequently transformed into an
animal, often into the animal that is sacred to
him. From this the assumption was obvious
that the god himself was the animal, and that he
had evolved from the totem animal at a later

⁸²Robertson Smith, “Religion of the Semites.”

244

stage of religious feeling. But the reflection
that the totem itself is nothing but a substitute
for the father relieves us of all further discussion.
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 evo-
lution, namely, the longing for the father, might
become possible if in the course of time an essen-
tial 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.⁸³ The
situation created by the removal of the father
contained an element which in the course of time
must have brought about an extraordinary in-
crease of longing for the father. For the broth-
ers 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 pres-
sure which the bonds of the brother clan exer-
cised upon each member, this wish had to remain
unfulfilled. No one could or was allowed to at-
tain the father’s perfection of power, which was

⁸³See above, p. 127.

245

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

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 con-
quered primal father, as 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 dis-
tinguished 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 pre-
sumption, was still by no means offensive to the
conceptions of classical antiquity.⁸⁴ 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.

⁸⁴“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
families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification
of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as the
canonization of a saint seems to a modern Catholic.” Frazer,
“The Golden Bough,” I; “The Magic Art and the Evolution of
Kings,” II, p. 177.

246

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 logi-
cally extended to the other side of human 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 un-
restricted primal father was great enough to in-
sure the continuation of the religious need, the
preservation 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-ani-
mal. But in attempting to understand this sit-
uation we must beware of interpretations which
superficially seek to translate it as an allegory,
and which forget the historical stages in the pro-
cess. The twofold presence of the father corre-
sponds to the two successive meanings of the

247

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 represent his high-
est triumph. The meaning which sacrifice has
quite generally acquired is found in the fact that
in the very same action which continues the mem-
ory 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 sim-
ple offering to the deity, a self-deprivation in
favor of the god. God himself is now so exalted
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 system to the state.
It must be said that the revenge of the deposed
and reinstated father has been very cruel; it cul-
minated 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 responsibility. God him-
self has demanded and ordained it. Myths in
which the god himself kills the animal that is

248

sacred to him, which he-
self really is, belong
to this phase. This is the greatest possible de-
nial of the great misdeed with which society and
the sense of guilt began. There is an unmis-
takable second meaning in this sacrificial demon-
stration. It expresses satisfaction at the fact
that the earlier father substitute has been aban-
doned in favor of the higher conception of god.
The superficial allegorical translation of the
scene here roughly corresponds with its psycho-
analytic interpretation by saying that the god
is represented as overcoming the animal part of
his nature.⁸⁵

But it would be erroneous to believe that in
this period of renewed patriarchal authority the
hostile impulses which belong to the father com-
plex had entirely subsided. On the contrary,
the first phases in the domination of the two new
substitutive formations for the father, those of
gods and kings, plainly show the most ener-
getic expression of that ambivalence which is
characteristic of religion.

⁸⁵It 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 system by another, either as the result
of conquest by a strange race or by means of a psychological
development. 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.

249

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

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 rôle on specified holidays. 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 sac-
rifice 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 theanthropic
god sacrifice into which unfortunately I cannot
enter with the same thoroughness with which the
animal sacrifice has been treated throws the clear-
est light upon the meaning of the older forms of
sacrifice. It acknowledges with unsurpassable
candor 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 easily solved. The
original animal sacrifice was already a substitute
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 sacrifice.

250

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
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.
I need not fully indicate here the developments
of religious thought which made this return pos-
sible in the form of rationalizations. Robertson
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 ceremony
of the festivals in which the old Semites cele-
brated the death of a deity were interpreted as
a “commemoration of a mythical-
tragedy” and
that the attendant lament was not characterized
by spontaneous sympathy, but displayed a com-
pulsive character, something that was imposed
by the fear of a divine wrath.⁸⁶ We are in a
position to acknowledge that this interpretation
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

⁸⁶“Religion of the Semites,” pp. 412–413. “The mourning is
not a spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine tragedy,
but obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And
a chief object of the mourners is to disclaim responsibility for the
god’s death—a point which has already come before us in con-
nection with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the ‘ox-
murder at
Athens.’ ”

251

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 problem and
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 psychic
transformations.

The endeavor of the son to put himself in
place of the father god, appeared with greater
and greater distinctness. With the introduction
of agriculture the importance of the son in the
patriarchal family increased. He was embold-
ened to give new expression to his incestuous
libido which found symbolic satisfaction in labor-
ing over mother earth. There came into exist-
ence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis, Tammuz,
and others, spirits of vegetation as well as youth-
ful divinities who enjoyed the favors 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 youth-
ful lovers of the maternal goddesses with short
life and punishment through castration or
through the wrath of the father god appearing
in animal form. Adonis was killed by the boar,

252

the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, the lover
of Kybele, died of castration.⁸⁷ The lamenta-
tion for these gods and the joy at their resur-
rection 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 him-
self 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 one that Christ took. He sacrificed

⁸⁷The fear of castration plays an extraordinarily big rôle in
disturbing the relations to the father in the case of our youthful
neurotics. In Ferenczi’s excellent study we have seen how the
boy recognized his totem in the animal which snaps at his little
penis. When children learn about ritual circumcision they iden-
tify it with castration. To my knowledge the parallel in the
psychology of races to this attitude of our children has not yet
been drawn. The circumcision which was so frequent in primor-
dial times among primitive races belongs to the period of initia-
tion in which its meaning is to be found; it has only secondarily
been relegated to an earlier time 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.

253

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
penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek
antiquity.⁸⁸ 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 everything
that issued from it must carry on the punishment
for this crime.⁸⁹ Although the features of band-
ing together, killing, and dismembering as ex-
pressed in the deed of the Titans very clearly
recall the totem sacrifice described by St. Nilus—
as also many other myths of antiquity, for ex-
ample, the death of Orpheus himself—we are
nevertheless disturbed here by the variation ac-
cording to which a youthful god was murdered.

In the Christian myth man’s original sin is
undoubtedly an offense 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 feeling, a mur-
der

⁸⁸Reinach, “Cultes, Mythes, et Religions,” II, p. 75.

⁸⁹“Une sorte de péché proethnique,” l. c., p. 76.

254

der can be atoned only by the sacrifice of another
life; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-guilt.⁹⁰
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. The 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 expiation 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 father. The re-
ligion of the son succeeds the religion of the
father. As a sign of this substitution the old
totem feast is revived again in the form of com-
munion 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 them-
 

⁹⁰The suicidal impulses of our neurotics regularly prove to be
self-punishments for death wishes directed against others.

255

selves with him and becoming holy themselves.
Thus through the ages we see the identity of the
totem feast with the animal sacrifice, the thean-
thropic human sacrifice, and the Christian euch-
arist, and in all these solemn occasions we recog-
nize the after-effects of that crime which so op-
pressed men but of which they must have been so
proud. At bottom, however, the Christian com-
munion is a new setting aside of the father, a rep-
etition of the crime that must be expiated. We
see how well justified is Frazer’s dictum that “the
Christian communion has absorbed within itself
a sacrament which is doubtless far older than
Christianity.”⁹¹

7

A process like the removal of the primal father
by the band of brothers must have left ineradi-
cable traces in the history of mankind and must
have expressed itself the more frequently in
numerous substitutive forma-tions the less it itself
was to be remembered.⁹² I am avoiding the

⁹¹“Eating the God,” p. 51. … Nobody familiar with the litera-
ture on this subject will assume that the tracing back of the
Christian communion to the totem feast is an idea of the author
of this book.

⁹²Ariel in “The Tempest”:

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. …

256

temptation of pointing out these traces in myth-
ology, where they are not hard to find, and am
turning to another field in following a hint of S.
Reinach in his suggestive treatment of the death
of Orpheus.⁹³

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 Greek 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 essen-
tial 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 accompanied the hero with their
sympathies, trying to restrain and warn him, and

⁹³La Mort d’Orphée, “Cultes, Mythes, et Religions,” Vol. II, p.
100.

257

lamented his fate after he had met with what was
considered 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 primordial
tragedy the repetition of which here serves a cer-
tain 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 distor-
tion of the historical scene or, one is tempted to
say, it was the result of refined hypocrisy. Ac-
tually, in the old situation, it was the members
of the chorus themselves who had caused the suf-
fering 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 col-
leagues 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
divine goat Dionysos in the performance of the

258

Greek tragedy and the lament of the retinue of
goats who identified themselves with him, one can
easily understand how the almost extinct 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 religion,
ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus com-
plex. 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 psychological
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 towards the same
object, at the root of important cultural forma-
tions. 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 life, was acquired by

259

mankind from the father complex,⁹⁴ where psy-
choanalytic investigation of the individual to-day
still reveals the strongest expression of it.⁹⁵

Before closing we must take into account that
the remarkable convergence reached in these il-
lustrations, pointing to a single inclusive rela-
tion, ought not to blind us to the uncertainties of
our assumptions and to the difficulties of our con-
clusions. Of these difficulties I will point out
only two which must have forced themselves
upon many readers.

In the first place it can hardly have escaped
any one that we base everything upon the as-
sumption 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

⁹⁴⁾That is to say, the parent complex.

⁹⁵⁾I am 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 society, 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 rôle
in such a synthesis, although it will be necessary to overcome
great affective resistances before such importance will be con-
ceded to it.

260

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 in-
deed to be weighty objections and any other ex-
planation 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 assumption
of a mass psyche, or a continuity in the emo-
tional life of mankind which permits us to dis-
regard the interruptions of psychic acts through
the transgression of individuals, social psychol-
ogy 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 con-
fronted by two new questions: how much can be
attributed to this psychic continuity within the
series of generations, and what ways and means
does a generation use to transfer its psychic
states to the next generation? I do not claim
that these problems have been sufficiently ex-
plained or that direct communication and tradi-
tion, of which one immediately thinks, are ade-
quate for the task. Social psychology is in gen-
 

261

eral little concerned with the manner in which
the required continuity in the psychic life of
succeeding generations is established. A part
of the task seems to be performed by the inheri-
tance of psychic dispositions which, however,
need certain incentives in the individual life in
order to become effective. This may be the
meaning of the poet’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 suppres-
sion must leave room for distorted substitutions
and their resulting reactions. But in that case
we may assume that no generation is capable of
concealing 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 effected in the expression of his feel-
ings. By this method of unconscious under-
standing of all customs, ceremonies, and laws
which the original relation to the primal father
had left behind, later generations may also have
succeeded in taking over this legacy of feelings.

262

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 re-
actions 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 cre-
ative sense of guilt has not become extinct with
us. We find its asocial effects in neurotics pro-
ducing new rules of morality and continued
restrictions, in expiation for misdeeds committed,
or as precautions against misdeeds to be com-
mitted.⁹⁶ But when we examine these neurotics
for the deeds which have called forth such reac-
tions, we are disappointed. We do not find
deeds, but only impulses and feelings which
sought evil but which were restrained from car-
rying it out. Only psychic realities and not
actual ones are at the basis of the neurotics’ 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 per-
son reacts only towards realities.

May it not be true that the case was somewhat
the same with primitive men? We are justified
in ascribing to them an extraordinary over-valu-
ation of their psychic acts as a partial manifesta-
 

⁹⁶ Compare Chapter II.

263

INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

tion of their narcistic organization.⁹⁷ 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 totem-
ism and taboo. We should thus escape the ne-
cessity of tracing back the beginning of our cul-
tural possession, of which we rightly are so proud,
to a horrible crime which wounds all our feelings.
The causal connection, 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 these conse-
quences. It may be agreed that a change has
really taken place in the form of society from
the father horde to the brother clan. This is a
strong argument, but it is not conclusive. The
change might have been accomplished in a less
violent manner and still have conditioned the ap-
pearance 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 op-
portunity. Of as little validity is the second ob-
jection, that everything derived from the ambiva-
lent relation to the father, namely taboos, and
rules of sacrifice, is characterized by the highest
seriousness and by complete reality. The cere-
 

⁹⁷See Chapter III.

264

monials and inhibitions of compulsion neurotics
exhibit this characteristic too and yet they go back
to a merely psychic reality, to resolution and not
to execution. We must beware 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 in-
telligently instead of correcting it according to
our standard. But in that case we must scruti-
nize more closely the prototype of the neurosis
itself which is responsible for having raised this
doubt. It is not true that compulsion neurotics,
who to-day are under the pressure of over-moral-
ity, defend themselves only against the psychic
reality of temptations and 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

265

persons had a period of badness in his childhood,
and a perverse phase as a fore-
runner and a
premise of the later over morality. The anal-
ogy between primitive men and neurotics is there-
fore much more fundamentally established if we
assume that with the former, too, the psychic real-
ity, 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 prim-
itive men be influenced too far by the analogy
with neurotics. Differences must also be taken
into account. Of course the sharp division be-
tween thinking and doing as we draw it does not
exist either with savages or with neurotics. But
the neurotic is above all inhibited in his actions,
with him the thought is a complete 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 reason I think we may
well assume in the case we are discussing, though
without vouching for the absolute certainty of
the decision, that, “In the beginning was the
deed.”

THE END