penetrate into the bodies of the women who pass such a spot. When a child is born the mother states at which spirit abode she thinks she conceived her child. This determines the totem of the child. It is further assumed that the spirits (of the dead as well as of the re-born) are bound to peculiar stone amulets, called Churinga, which are found in these places.
Two factors seem to have induced Frazer to believe that the oldest form of totemism had been found in the institution of the Aruntas. In the first place the existence of certain myths which assert that the ancestors of the Aruntas always lived on their totem animal, and that they married no other women except those of their own totem. Secondly, the apparent disregard of the sexual act in their theory of conception. People who had not yet realized that conception was the result of the sexual act might well be considered the most backward and primitive people living to-day.
Frazer, in having recourse to the Intichiuma ceremony to explain totemism, suddenly saw the totemic system in a totally different light as a thoroughly practical organization for accomplishing the most natural needs of man. (Compare Haddon above.[1]) The system was simply
- ↑ There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that metaphysical haze which some writers love to conjure up over the
