Part 7

I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim which was buried or burnt with the body of the person whom it was intended to honour. This is what was done by the dolmen-builders. The earlier reindeer hunters had no domestic animals to sacrifice, and it is unlikely that they sacrificed men. At all events, they were not cannibals.

On the other hand, cannibalism is closely connected with Pact Sacrifice, which there is a tendency now to regard as antecedent to Gift Sacrifice, especially among those scholars who think that the whole human race has passed through a stage of Totemism. Psychologically the Totemist’s sacrifice of a reserved animal to which all the sanctity of human life is ascribed, resembles the sacrifice by some African tribes of a human victim—as in both cases not only is a pact of brotherhood sealed, but also those who partake of the flesh are supposed to acquire the physical, moral, or supersensual qualities attributed to the victim. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that the Totem was a substitute for a human victim, and a whole new theory of Totemism might be evolved from that postulate, but it is wiser to observe such affinities without trying to derive one thing from another which commonly proves a snare and a delusion. It is sufficient to note that among fundamental human ideas is the belief that man grows like what he feeds upon.

The sacrifice of the Totem, though found scattered wherever Totemism prevails, is not an invariable or even a usual accompaniment of it. When it does occur, the Totem is not supposed to die, any more than the victim was supposed to die in the primitive Gift Sacrifice. It changes houses or goes to live with “our lost others,” or returns to eternal life in the “lake of the dead.” The death of the soul is the last thing that is thought of. The majority of Totemists do not kill their Totems under any circumstances, and when the Totem is a wild beast they believe that it shows a like respect for the members of its phratry. If one dies they deplore its loss; in some parts of East Africa where the Totem is a hyena not even the chief is mourned for with equal ceremony.

Totemism is the adoption of an animal (or plant) as the visible badge of an invisible bond. The word Totem is an American Indian word for “badge,” and the word Taboo a Polynesian term meaning an interdiction. The Totemist generally says that he is descended from his Totem: hence the men and the beasts of each Totem clan are brothers. But the beast is something more than a brother, he is the perpetual reincarnation of the race-spirit. Numerical problems never trouble the natural human mind; all the cats of Bubastis were equally sacred, and all the crows of Australia are equally sacred to the clans who have a crow for Totem. To the mass of country folks every cow is _the_ cow, every mouse is _the_ mouse; the English villager is practically as much convinced of this as the American Indian or the Australian native is convinced that every Totem is _the_ Totem.

Men and women of the same Totem are _taboo_: they cannot intermarry. But I need not speak of Totemism here as a social institution. My business with it is limited to its place in the history of ideas about animals.

In Totemism we find represented not one idea, but an aggregation of most of the fundamental ideas of mankind. This is why the attempt to trace it to one particular root has failed to dispose of the question of its origin in a final and satisfactory manner. For a time there seemed to be a general disposition to accept what is called the “Nickname theory” by which Totemism was attributed to the custom of giving animal nicknames. We have a peasant called Nedrott (in the Brescian dialect “duck”); I myself never heard his real name—his wife is “la Nedrott” and his children are “i Nedrotti.” It is alleged that his father or grandfather had flat feet. But I never heard of a confusion between the Nedrotti and their nicknamesakes. It may be said that this would be sure to happen were they less civilised. How can we be sure that it would be sure to happen? An eminent scholar who objects to the nickname theory on the ground that it assigns too much importance to “verbal misunderstanding,” proposes as an alternative the “impregnation theory.” A woman, on becoming aware of approaching motherhood, mentally connects the future offspring with an animal or plant which happens to catch her eye at that moment. This is conceivable, given the peculiar notions of some savages on generation, but if all Totemism sprang from such a cause, is it not strange that in Australia there are only two Totems, the eagle-hawk and crow?

As a mere outward fact, the Totem is what its name implies, a badge or sign; just as the wolf was the badge of Rome, or as the lion is taken to represent the British Empire. The convenience of adopting a common badge or sign may have appeared to men almost as soon as they settled into separate clans or communities. Besides public Totems there exist private and secret Totems, and this suggests that the earliest communities may have consisted of a sort of freemasonry, a league of mutual help of the nature of a secret society. Around the outward and so to speak heraldic fact of Totemism are gathered the impressions and beliefs which make it a rule of life, a morality and a religion.

The time may come when the desire to give a reason for an emotion will be recognised as one of the greatest factors in myth-making. The Totemist thinks that he spares his Totem because it is his Totem. But man is glad to find an excuse for sparing something. Altruism is as old as the day when the first bird took a succulent berry to its mate or young ones instead of eating it. Where men see no difference between themselves and animals, what more natural than that they should wish to spare them? When it was found difficult or impossible to spare all, it was a katharsis of the wider sentiment to spare one, and Totemism gave a very good excuse. It appealed to a universal instinct. This is not the same as to say that it had its origin in keeping pets; it would be nearer the truth to describe the love of pets as a later birth of the same instinctive tendency which the Totemist follows when he cherishes and preserves his Totem.

The primitive man is a child in the vast zoological garden of Nature; a child with a heart full of love, curiosity and respect, anxious to make friends with the lion which looks so very kind and the white bear who must want some one to comfort him. The whole folk-lore of the world bears witness to this temper, even leaving Totemism out of the question.

The Bechuanas make excuses to the lion before killing him, the Malays to the tiger, the Red Indians to the bear—he says that his children are hungry and need food—would the bear kindly not object to be killed? Some writers see Totemism in all this, and so it may be, but there is something in it deeper than even Totemism—there is human nature.

Take the robin—has any one said it was a Totem? Yet Mrs. Somerville declared she would as soon eat a child as a robin, a thoroughly Totemist sentiment. A whole body of protective superstition has crystallised around certain creatures which, because of their confiding nature, their charming ways, their welcome appearance at particular seasons, inspired man with an unusually strong impulse to spare them. I was interested to find the stork as sacred to the Arabs in Tunis and Algeria as he is to his German friends in the North. A Frenchman remarked that “sacred birds are never good to eat,” but he might have remembered the goose and hen of the ancient Bretons which Cæsar tells us were kept “for pleasure” but never killed; not to speak of the pigeons of Moscow and of Mecca.

It should be observed how quickly the spared or cherished bird or beast becomes “lucky.” In Germany and Scandinavia it is lucky to have a stork’s nest on the roof. The regimental goat is the “luck of his company.”

M. S. Reinach’s opinion that in Totemism is to be found the secret of the domestication of animals offers an attractive solution to that great problem, but it has not been, nor do I think that it will ever be, generally accepted. It, is however, plain, that where population is sparse, and dogs and guns undreamt of, wild animals would be far less wild than in countries with all the advantages of civilisation; the tameness of birds on lonely islands when the explorer first makes his descent is a case in point. No doubt, therefore, with the encouragement they received, the animal Totems acquired a considerable degree of tameness, but from that to domestication there is a long step. Our household “Totem,” the robin, is relatively tame; he will even eat crumbs on the breakfast-table, but he flies away in springtime and we see him no more.

Besides being a social institution and a friendly bond between man and beast, Totemism is an attempt to explain the universe. Its spiritual vitality depends on the widely rooted belief in archetypes; the things seen are the mirror of the things unseen, the material is unreal, the immaterial the only reality. We are ourselves but cages of immortal birds. The real “I” is somewhere else; it may be in a fish, as in the Indian folk-tale, or it may be in a god. I do not know, by the by, if it has been remarked that a man can be a Totem: the incarnation of the indwelling race-spirit. The Emperor of Japan corresponds exactly to this description. The deified Cæsar was a Totem. A god can be a Totem: among the Hidery (islanders of the North Pacific whose interesting legends were published by the Chicago Folk-lore Association) the raven, which is their Totem, is the manifestation of the god Ne-kilst-lass who created the world. Here Totemism approaches till it touches Egyptian zoomorphism. Was this form an earlier or a later development than that in which the Totem is merely an ancestor? Our inability to reply shows our real want of certainty as to whether Totemism is a body of belief in a state of becoming or _in a state of dissolution_.

We do know that Egyptian zoomorphism is not old, at least in the exaggerated shape it assumed in the worship of the bull Apis. It is a cult which owed its success to the animistic tendency of the human mind, but its particular cause is to be looked for in crystallised figurative language. The stupendous marble tombs of the sacred bulls that seem to overpower us in the semi-obscurity of the Serapeum remind one of how easy it is to draw false conclusions relative to the past if we possess only half-lights upon it: had Egyptian hieroglyphics never yielded up their secret we might have judged the faith of Egypt to have been the most material, instead of one of the most spiritual of religions.

In Egyptian (as in Assyrian) cosmogony the visible universe is the direct creation of God. “The god who is immanent in all things is the creator of every animal: under his name of Ram, of the sheep, Bull, of the cows: he loves the scorpion in his hole, he is the god of the crocodile who plunges in the water: he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmee is an image, Ra is an image: HE alone maketh himself in millions of ways.” Amon Ra is described in another grand hymn as the maker of the grass for the cattle, of fruitful trees for men yet unborn; causing the fish to live in the river, the birds to fill the air, giving breath to those in the egg, giving food to the bird that perches, to the creeping thing and to the flying thing alike, providing food for the rats in their holes, feeding the flying things in every tree. “Hail to thee, say all creatures. Hail to thee for all these things: the One, Alone with many hands, awake while all men sleep, to seek out the good of all creatures, “Amon Sustainer of all!” This is, indeed, a majestic psalm of universal life.

Contrary to what was long the impression, the Wheel of Being was not an Egyptian doctrine, but the dead, or rather some of them, were believed to have the power of transforming themselves into animals for limited periods. It was a valued privilege of the virtuous dead: the form of a heron, a hawk or a swallow was a convenient travelling dress. Four-footed beasts were reserved to gods.

There was no prejudice against sport if carried on with due regard to vested sacred rights. The first hunting-dog whose name we know was Behkaa, who was buried with his master, his name being inscribed over his picture on the tomb. The injury of animals sacred to the gods was, of course, a grave sin. Among the protests of innocence of a departing soul we read: “I have not clipped the skins of the sacred beasts; I have not hunted wild animals in their pasturages; I have not netted the sacred birds; I have not turned away the cattle of the gods; I have not stood between a god and his manifestation.”

The Egyptian mind, which was essentially religious, saw the “god who is immanent in all things” yet standing outside these things to sustain them with a guiding providence; the highly trained Chinese mind, with its philosophic trend, saw the divine indivisible intelligence without volition illuminating all that lived: “The mind of man and the mind of trees, birds and beasts, is just the one mind of heaven and earth, only brighter or duller by reflection: as light looks brighter when it falls on a mirror than when it falls on a dark surface, so divine reason is less bright in cow or sheep than in man.” This fine definition was given by Choo-Foo-Tsze, the great exponent of Confucianism, who, when he was four years old, surprised his father by asking, on being told that the sky was heaven, “What is above it?” Choo-Foo-Tsze in the thirteenth century anticipated some modern conclusions of geology by remarking that since sea shells were found on lofty mountains as if generated in the middle of stones, it was plain “that what was below became lifted up, what was soft became hard”; it was a deep subject, he said, and ought to be investigated. Long before the Nolan, Confucius had conceived the idea of the great Monad: “one God who contains and comprehends the whole world.” It was an idea entirely incomprehensible to all but a few educated men in any age. Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism left the Chinese masses what they found them—a people whose folk-lore was their religion. Were they asked to believe in the Wheel of Being? They made that folk-lore too. Dr. Giles tells the folk-tale of a certain gentleman who, having taken a very high degree, enjoyed the privilege (which is admitted to be uncommon) of recollecting what happened between his last death and birth. After he died, he was cited before a Judge of Purgatory and his attention was attracted by a quantity of skins of sheep, dogs, oxen, horses, which were hanging in a row. These were waiting for the souls which might be condemned to wear them; when one was wanted, it was taken down and the man’s own skin was stripped off and the other put on. This gentleman was condemned to be a sheep; the attendant demons helped him on with his sheep-skin when the Recording Officer suddenly mentioned that he had once saved a man’s life. The Judge, after looking at his books, ruled that such an act balanced all his misdoings: then the demons set to work to pull off the sheep-skin bit by bit, which gave the poor gentleman dreadful pain, but at last it was all got off except one little piece which was still sticking to him when he was born again as a man.

This story is amusing as showing what a mystical doctrine may come to when it gets into the hands of the thoroughgoing realist. For the Chinese peasant the supernatural has no mystery. To him it is a mere matter of ordinary knowledge that beasts, birds, fishes and insects not only have ghosts but also ghosts of ghosts—for the first ghost is liable to die. If any of these creatures do not destroy life in three existences, they may be born as men—a belief no doubt due to the Buddhists, who in China seem to have concentrated all their energies on humanitarian propaganda and let metaphysics alone. Taoism has been called an “organised animism.” Organised or unorganised, animism is still the popular faith of China. It is too convenient to lightly abandon, for it explains everything. For instance, whatever is odd, unexpected, very lucky, very unlucky, can be made as plain as day by mentioning the word “fox.” Any one may be a fox without your knowing it: the fox is a jinnee, an elf who can work good or harm to man; who can see the future, get possession of things at a distance, and generally outmatch the best spiritualist medium. In Chinese folk-lore the fox has, as it were, made a monopoly of the world-wide notion that animals have a more intimate knowledge of the supernatural than men. Soothsayers are thought to be foxes because they know what is going to happen.

Man’s speculations about himself and the universe arrange themselves under three heads: those which have not yet become a system, those which are a system, those which are the remains of a system. It is impossible that any set of ideas began by being a system unless it were revealed by an angel from heaven. But no sooner do ideas become systematic than they pass into the stage of dogma which is accepted not discussed. Everything is made to fit in with them. Thus to find the free play of the human mind one must seek it where there are the fewest formulæ, written or unwritten, for tradition is as binding as any creed or code. There are savage races which, if they ever had Totemism, have preserved few if any traces of it. To take them one by one and inquire into their views on animals would be well worth doing, but it is beyond my modest scope. I will say this, however—show me a savage who has not some humane and friendly ideas about animals! The impulse to confess brotherhood with man’s poor relations is everywhere the same: the excuses or reasons given for it vary a little. The animal to be kindly treated is the sanctuary of a god, the incarnation of a tribe, or simply the shelter of a poor wandering ghost.

The Amazulu, one of the finest of savage races, believe that _some_ snakes are Amatongo—some, not all. In fact, these snakes which are dead men are rather rare. One kind is black and another green. An Itongo does not come into the house by the door, nor does it eat frogs or mice. It does not run away like other snakes. Some say, “Let it be killed.” Others interfere, “What, kill a man?” If a man die who had a scar and you see a snake with a scar, ten to one it is that man. Then, at night, the village chief _dreams_ and the dead man speaks to him. “Do you now wish to kill me? Do you already forget me? I thought I would come and ask you for food, and do you kill me?” Then he tells him his name.

Without any teaching, without any system, the savage thinks that the appearances which stand before him in sleep are real. If they are not real, what are they? The savage may not be a reasonable being, but he is a being who reasons.

In the morning the village chief tells his dream and orders a sin-offering to the Itongo (ghost) lest he be angry and kill them. A bullock or a goat is sacrificed and they eat the flesh. Afterwards they look everywhere for the snake, but it has vanished.

A snake that forces its way rapidly into a house is known to be a liar and he is a liar still. Do they turn him out of doors with a lecture on the beauty of veracity? Far from that. “They sacrifice something to such an Itongo.” A few men turn into poisonous snakes, but this is by no means common. If offended, the Amatongo cause misfortune, but even if pleased they do not seem to confer many benefits; perhaps they cannot, for surely it is easier to do evil than good. Once, however, a snake which was really the spirit of a chief, placed its mouth on a sore which a child had; the mother was in a great fright, but happily she did not interfere and the snake healed the sore and went silently away.

Other animals are sometimes human beings as well as snakes. The lizard is often the Itongo of an old woman. A boy killed some lizards in a cattle-pen with stones. Then he went and told his grandmother, who said he had done very wrong—those lizards were chiefs of the village and should have been worshipped. I think the grandmother was a humane old person; I even suspect that she said the lizards were chiefs and not old women to make the admonition more awful. The man who told this story to Canon Callaway (from whose valuable work on the Amazulu I take these notes) added that, looking back to the incident, he doubted if the lizards were Amatongo after all, because no harm came of their murder. He thought that they must have been merely wild animals which had become tame owing to people mistakenly thinking that they were Amatongo.

What can one say to boys who ill-treat lizards? I own that I have threatened them with ghostly treatment of the same sort. I even tried the supernatural argument with a little Arab boy, otherwise a nice intelligent child, who was throwing stones at a lizard which was moving at the bottom of the deep Roman well at El Djem: I did not know then that the persecution of lizards in Moslem lands is supposed (I hope erroneously) to have been ordered by Mohammed “because the lizard mimics the attitude of the Faithful at prayer.”

The lizard, one of the most winsome of God’s creatures, has suffered generally from the prejudice which made reptile a word of reproach. It is the more worthy of remark, therefore, that in a place where one would hardly expect it, protective superstition has done its work of rescue: Sicilian children catch lizards, but let them go unhurt to intercede for them before the Lord, as the lizard is held to be “in the presence of the Lord in heaven.” One wonders if this is some distant echo of the text about the angels of the children (their archetypes) who always see God.

Not always were reptiles scorned, but, possibly, they were always feared. Man’s first idea is to worship what he fears; his second idea, which may not come for many thousand years, is to throw a stone at it. The stone, besides representing physical fear, at a given moment also represents religious reprobation of what had been an object of worship in a forsaken faith. Primitive man took the interest of a wondering child in the great Saurian tribe. How did he know that they _flew_, that there were “dragons” on the earth? How did he know that the snake once had legs?—for if the snake of Eden was ordered to go on its belly, the inference seems to be that he was thought once to have moved in another way. The snake has lost his legs and the lizard his wings, and how the ancient popular imagination of the world made such accurate guesses about them must be left a riddle, unless we admit that it was guided by the fossil remains of extinct monsters.

The serpent of the Biblical story was, says Dr. H. P. Smith, “simply a jinnee—a fairy if you will—possessed of more knowledge than the other animals, but otherwise like them.” Here, again, we meet in the most venerable form, the belief that animals know more than men. Can we resist the conclusion that to people constantly inclined towards magic like the old-world Jews, it must have appeared that Eve was dabbling in magic—by every rule of ancient religion, the sin of sins?