The background of totemism / by E. Washburn Hopkins.

  • Edward Washburn Hopkins
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The background of totemism / by E. Washburn Hopkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/30 page 583
    became as food and drink divine; Soma as intoxicant became a magical thing, taboo to the vulgar. Yet neither Soma nor cow ever became a totem. Their divinity lay in their use not in their an- cestorhood.^ Wundt thinks he has added something to the history of totemism by saying that in establishing the totem on a cultural basis the cult itself was made permanent; in other words, periodic religious cere¬ monies leading up to an observance of days in general were intro¬ duced by totemism, which (in Wundt’s own words) was “the great¬ est and most important step taken in the development of cult ” (that is, of cult in general).2 Yet this discovery of Wundt is not so sig¬ nificant as it appears to be. For it rests on the conviction that totemism is the base of all other cults. As a matter of fact, savages base their cult much more generally on seasonal changes than on totemic observances; in fact, the latter are often no more than the reflection of the former. Wundt with his overdriven theory of the Fanany-cult fails to recognize the equally old and far more common fear of animals not as totems but as spirit forms of reincarnated human beings. This popular belief is more important than that of the “ worm spirit.” On the whole, Wundt’s theory that totemism underlies'all religion and that, underlying totemism, is the belief that the worms crawling out of a dead man’s body are his souls is as little likely to satisfy serious investigators as any of the one-sided theories of the origin of religion Avhich preceded it. N^ot only is totemism not the basis of religion, it represents no religious stage or stratum whatever.^ If, then, we have regard to the fact that with all its divergencies in detail totemism in its original habitat (i. e., where the name arose) is ill the main a recognition of a peculiar bond subsisting between a group of human and a group of animal or vegetable beings, that this bond is not an individual or sex matter, but that in the great ma- jorit}^ of cases it is connected with dietary restrictions, we ha^ e the basis of what may reasonably be called totemism. To dub every cult of an animal totemic is like calling any object of religious regard a fetish; it tends to meaninglessness. From this point of view we may then reasonably admit as totemic what appears to be the earlier stage in this human bond, as illustrated by the cases forming what I have ventured to call the background of totemism, Australian, Peruvian, etc., in which the reason for the bond is palpably because the totem (though not yet a real totem) is regarded as the provider of sustenance, primarily because it is the totemist’s food, Mother 1 The divine myrobolan called “ chebullc ” as an efficacious drug arose from a drop of ambrosia ; garlic sprang from drops shod by Rahu and has a demoniac power, etc. The Varuna tree i.s named for the god. Other plants and trees receive a similar sanctity. -Wundt, op. cit. 2, 258. ® See on this point the very sensible observations of Dr. Goldenwelser, op. cit., p. 264.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3