The Secret of the Totem. Andrew Lang
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the tribe traceable in surviving institutions—From passion to Law—Rudeness of native culture in Australia—Varieties of social organisation there—I. Tribes with two phratries, totems, female descent—Tribes of this organisation differ as to ceremonies and beliefs—Some beliefs tend to polytheism: others towards monotheism—Some tribes of pristine organisation have totemic magic and pirrauru: others have not—The more northern tribes of pristine organisation share the ceremonies and beliefs of central tribes: not so the south-eastern tribes—Second form (a) of social organisation has male descent—Second form (b) has female descent plus "matrimonial classes"—Account of these—Eight-class system—The Arunta nation—Their peculiar form of belief in reincarnation—Churinga nanja—Recapitulation—The Euahlayi tribe.
The question of the origin of totemism has more than the merely curious or antiquarian interest of an historic or prehistoric mystery. In the course of the inquiry we may be able to discern and discriminate the relative contributions of unreflecting passion, on one hand, and of deliberate reason, on the other, to the structure of the earliest extant form of human society. That form is the savage local tribe, as known to us in America and in Australia.
Men live in united local communities, relatively large, and carefully regimented, before they have learned to domesticate animals, or to obey chiefs, or to practise the rudest form of agriculture, or to fashion clay into pottery, or to build permanent hovels. Customary law is older than any of these things, and the most ancient law which we can observe unites a tribe by that system of marriages which expresses itself in totemism.
It is plain that the processes of evolution which have resulted in the most backward societies known to us, must have been very complex. If we reflect that the society of the Australian aborigines presents the institution of local tribes, each living peacefully, except for occasional internal squabbles, in a large definite tract of country; cultivating, on the whole, friendly relations with similar and similarly organised tribes; while obeying a most elaborate system of rules, it is obvious that these social conditions must be very remote from the absolutely primitive.[1] The rules of these tribes regulate every detail of private life with a minuteness and a rigour that remind us of what the Scottish Cavalier (1652) protested against as "the bloody and barbarous inconveniences of Presbyterial Government." Yet the tribes have neither presbyters, nor priests, nor kings. Their body of customary law, so copious and complex that, to the European, it seems as puzzling as algebra is to the savage, has been evolved, after a certain early point, by the slow secular action of "collective wisdom." We shall find that on this point, early deliberate modification of law, there can be no doubt.
The recent personal researches of Mr. Howitt and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen make it certain that tribal affairs, now, among many tribes at least, are discussed with the utmost deliberation, and that modifications of institutions may be canvassed, adopted, or rejected, on the initiative of seniors, local "Headmen," and medicine men.[2] It is also certain that tribe borrows from tribe, in the matter of songs, dances, and institutions, while members of one tribe are permitted to be present at the sacred ceremonials of others, especially when these tribes are on intermarrying terms.[3] In such cases, the ceremonials of one tribe may affect those of another, the Arunta may influence the Urabunna, who borrow their sacred objects or churinga for use in their own rites. We even hear of cases in which native religious ideas have been propagated by missionaries sent from tribe to tribe.[4]
Thus, conservative as is the savage by nature, he is distinctly capable of deliberate modification of his rites, ceremonies, and customary laws, and of interchanging ideas on these subjects with neighbouring tribes.
All this is true, to-day, and doubtless has long been true.
But at this point we must guard against what we consider a prevalent fallacy. The legislative action of the natives, the initiative of local Headmen, and Heads of Totems and of "Classes" (social divisions), and of medicine men inspired by "some supernatural being, such as Kutchi of the Dieri, Bunjil of the Wurunjerri, or Daramulun of the Coast Murring,"[5] is only rendered possible by the existence, to-day, of social conditions which cannot be primitive. To-day the Tribe, with its innumerable rules, and its common faith in Kutchi or Daramulun, with its recognised local or social Headmen, with its regulations for dealing with other tribes, and with its heralds or messengers, is an institution "in being." But, necessarily, this was not always so; the Tribe itself is a great "conquest of culture," and that conquest must have been made very slowly.
The prevalent fallacy, then, is to take unconsciously for granted that the people was, from the beginning, regimented into tribes, or existed in "hordes" already as capable as actual tribes of deliberative assemblies and legislative action, and that, in these hordes, a certain law, "the universal basis of their social system, was brought about by intention," as Mr. Howitt believes.[6]
The law in question, "the universal basis of their social system," was nothing less than a rule compelling people who had hitherto been promiscuous in their unions, to array themselves into a pair of tribal divisions, in which no member might marry another member of the same division, but must marry a member of the opposite division. The mere idea of such an act of legislation, for which no motive is assigned (and no motive is conceivable) postulates the pre-existence of a community like the Tribe of to-day, with powers to legislate, and to secure obedience for its legislative acts. This postulate cannot be granted, it refracts the institutions of to-day on a past state of society which, in all probability, could possess no such institutions. The "chaotic horde" of the hypothesis could not allot to various human groups the duty of working magic (to take an instance) for the good of various articles of the common food supply, nor could it establish a new and drastic rule, suddenly regulating sexual unions which had previously been utterly unregulated.
Human history does not show us a relatively large mass segregating itself into smaller communities. It shows us small communities aggregating into larger combinations, the village into the city, the European tribes into the kingdom, the kingdoms into the nation, the nation into the empire. The Tribe itself, in savage society, is a combination of small kins, or sets of persons of various degrees of status; these kins have not been legislatively segregated out of a pre-existing horde having powers of legislation. The idea of such a legislative primeval horde has been unconsciously borrowed from the actual Tribe of experience to-day.
That tribe is not primitive, far from it, but is very old.
Tribal collective wisdom, when once the tribe was evolved, has probably been at work, in unrecorded ages, over all the world, and in most places seems, up to a certain point, to have followed much the same strange course. The path does not march straight to any point predetermined by man, but loops, and zigzags, and retreats, and returns on itself, like the course of a river beset by rocks and shoals, and parcelled into wandering streams, and lagging in morasses. Yet the river reaches the sea, and the loops and links of the path, frayed by innumerable generations of early men, led at last to the haven of the civilised Family, and the Family Peace.
The history of the progress must necessarily be written in the strange characters of savage institutions, and in these odd and elaborate regulations which alarm the incurious mind under the names of "Phratries," "Totems," "Matrimonial Classes," "Pirrauru," and "Piraungaru." In these, as in some Maya or Easter Island inscription, graven in bizarre signs, lies the early social history of Man. We pore over the characters, turning them this way and that, deciphering a mark here and there, but unable to agree on any coherent rendering of the whole, so that some scholars deem the problems insoluble—and most are at odds among themselves.
Possibly we can at last present a coherent translation of the record which lies half concealed and half revealed in the savage institutions with their uncouth names, and can trace the course of an evolution which, beginning in natural passions, emotions, and superstitions, reached a rudimentary social law.