nent name for communities and individuals that could be preserved in writing. . . . Thus totemism arises, not from a religious, but from a prosaic everyday need of mankind. The giving of names, which is the essence of totemism, is a result of the technique of primitive writing. The totem is of the nature of an easily represented writing symbol. But if savages first bore the name of an animal they deduced the idea of relationship from this animal.[1]
Herbert Spencer,[2] also, thought that the origin of totemism was to be found in the giving of names. The attributes of certain individuals, he showed, had brought about their being named after animals so that they had come to have names of honor or nicknames which continued in their descendants. As a result of the indefiniteness and incomprehensibility of primitive languages, these names are said to have been taken by later generations as proof of their descent from the animals themselves. Totemism would thus be the result of a mistaken reverence for ancestors.
Lord Avebury (better known under his former name, Sir John Lubbock) has expressed
- ↑ Pikler and Sornló, “The Origin of Totemism,” 1901. The authors rightly call their attempt at explanation a “Contribution to the materialistic theory of History.”
- ↑ “The Origin of Animal Worship,” Fortnightly Review, 1870. “Principles of Psychology,” Vol. I, paragraphs 169 to 176.
