The golden bough : a study in comparative religion / by J.G. Frazer.

Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The golden bough : a study in comparative religion / by J.G. Frazer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    kill whom would be a great crime, and to be carefully avoided. Similarly, a native who has a vegetable for his kodong may not gather it under certain circum- stances, and at a particular period of the year.^ Here it will be observed that though each man spares all the animals or plants of the species, they are not all equally precious to him ; far from it, out of the whole species there is only one which is specially dear to him ; but as he does not know which the dear one is, he is obliged to spare them all from fear of injuring the one. Again, this explanation of the tribal totem harmonises with the supposed effect of killing one of the totem species. One day one of the blacks killed a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa (crow) [i.e. a man of the Crow clan or tribe] named Larry died. He had been ailing for some days, but the killing of his wingong [totem] hastened his death.^ Here the kill- ing of the crow caused the death of a man of the Crow clan, exactly as, in the case of the sex totems, the killing of a bat causes the death of a Bat man, or the killing of an owl causes the death of an Owl woman. Similarly, the killing of his nagual causes the death of a Central American Indian, the killing of his ihlozi causes the death of a Zulu, the killing of his tamaniu causes the death of a Banks Islander, and the killing of the animal in which his life is stowed away causes the death of the giant or warlock in the fairy tale. Thus it appears that the story of The giant who had no heart in his body furnishes the key to the religious aspect of totemism, that is, to the relation which is supposed to subsist between a man and his totem. The totem, if I am right, is simply the recep- 1 (Sir) George Grey, Journals of ^ Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Two Expeditions of Discover}'in North- Kttrnai, -p. 169.