He was one of the founders of the study of " Psychical Research," and his other writings on anthropology include The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), Magic and Religion (1901) and The Secret of the Totem (1905).
This tribe may legally marry within the totem, but always avoids such unions.
Among the Caribs a like social order prevailed; indeed, their family system is identical with the totem system of North American Indians.
Each spirit, as it quits its nanja or natural haunt to enter the mother, drops a churinga, a slab of stone or wood marked with the child's totem and containing its spirit attributes.
Ceremonies of initiation are the means by which the alliance is established between the deity and the young man, when the latter enters upon the rights of manhood; and the supposed bond of kinship is thus regarded as an artificial union from the outset, so far as the individual is concerned, although Robertson Smith still maintains the theory of the fatherhood of the god, where it is a question of the origin of the totem-kin.
The warrior painted the story of conflicts on his robe only in part, to help him recount the history of his life; the Eskimo etched the prompters of his legend on ivory; the Tlinkit carved them on his totem post; the women fixed them in pottery, basketry, or blankets.
The victim was the animal of a hostile totem-kin or an animal commonly offered to the god.
These rites are common in North America, but are worked by members of gilds or societies, not by totem kins.
All belonged to the same totem or totemic class, and might be scattered throughout the tribe, though subject to the same marriage laws.
We may indeed with Mr Andrew Lang explain the many myths of the bestial transformations of Zeus on the theory that the God was the tribal ancestor and assumed the shape of the animal-totem in order to engender the tribal patriarch; 7 but on the actual cults of Zeus theriomorphism has left less trace than on those.
This immortal House had been somewhat lowly on the immortal totem pole, evidenced by the fact it was a third the height of most of the others.
The cult of the serpent is found in many parts of the Old World; it is also not unknown in America; in Australia, on the other hand, though many species of serpent are found, there does not appear to be any species of cult unless we include the Warramunga cult of the mythical Wollunqua totem animal, whom they seek to placate by rites.
There is said to be but one exception to the rule that marriage must be contracted outside the totem name.
This was naturally found in the non-human member of the totem-kin - the totem animal; in a sense, therefore, the god died for his people.
The carved totem posts of the Haida, standing in front of the heavily framed houses, or at a little distance from them, represent the coats of arms of the respective families of the tribes and generally exhibit designs treated in a bold and original manner, highly conventionalized but always recognizable in their purport by any one familiar with the distinctive marks of the animal forms portrayed.
All or nearly all of these were at one time totem animals among one or another of the Semitic tribes, and were not eaten because primitive men will not eat animals between which and themselves and their gods they believe a peculiar tie of kinship to exist.
Such abstinences as the above, though based on taboo, that is, on a reluctance to eat the totem or sacred animal, are yet ascetic in so far as they involve much self-denial.
Thus in Australia the initiation ceremonies, concerned as they partly are with marriage, always an affair between the kin-groups, are tribal, whilst the totemic rites are the prime concern of the members of the totem clans.
In place of the goat or fawn a bear might have been expected, but the choice may have been influenced by the animal totem of the tribe into whose hands the ritual fell.
The son of an Australian male, whose kin or totem name is Crane, takes, in many tribes, his mother's kin-name, Swan or Cockatoo, or whatever it may be, and the same is a common rule in Africa and America among races who rarely remember their great-grandfathers.
Among all these tribes religion now takes another line, the belief in a supernormal race of Titanic beings, with no superior, who were the first dwellers on earth; who possessed powers far exceeding those of the medicine-men of to-day; and who, in one way or another, were connected with, or developed from, the totem animals,vegetables and other objects.
Most of the magic is worked (Intichiuma in Arunta) by the members of each totem kin or group for the behoof of the totem as an article of food supply.
239), between the whole of the kinship group, whether adult or not; and, moreover, nowhere are rites found which are intended to strengthen the union between a man and his totem by means of the blood bond, unless we include the aberrant totemism of the Arunta (Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 167), who eat their totems in order to gain magical powers of increasing the stock of the totem animal.
His great opponent (for the eternal dualism comes in) is Khanukh, who is a wolf, and the ancestor or totem of the wolf-race of men as Yehl is of the raven.
We may regard the local beastand plant-gods of Egypt as survivals of totems and totem-gods like those of Australia, India, America, Africa, Siberia and other countries.
Marillier further argues that if, on the other hand, there was no bond between god and people but that of the common meal, it does not appear that the god is a totem god; there is no reason why the animal should have been a totem; and in any case this idea of sacrifice can hardly have been anything but a slow growth and consequently not the origin of the practice.
All the Baganda belong to one or other of twenty-nine clans, or " Bika, " which are named after and have as totem familiar beasts, birds, fish or vegetables.
(vi.) In secret societies we find bodies of men grouped together with a single tutelary animal; the individual, in the same way, acquires the nagual or individual totem, sometimes by ceremonies of the nature of the bloodbond.
At the death of a man, his widows passed to his brother of the same totem class.
The human commensals were the totem-kin, whom Robertson Smith conceived to have been in the habit of sharing a common meal in daily life, or at least of not mixing with other kins.
There is also a " totem " system still in vogue.
In the Christian religion, especially where animal sacrifices, together with the cult of totem or holy animals, have been given up, it is usual to hallow the oil used in ritual anointings with I lyrical fantasia in one Sarah Bernhardt, whi and original of mode unity, persistent purp in a measure the tra he wrote his Sogno Gioconda; in the sue contemporary politic probably through th allusions in some of i {1901), a perfect r and emotion, magnifi most authoritative It first real although not to the Italian theatre.
