the result of a reformatory legislative bisection of the tribe, but of the existence of “two intermarrying totem clan groups.” The whole treatise, allowing for defects caused by the author’s death before the book was printed, is highly original and ingenious. The author, however, did not touch on the evolution of totemism.
9. The following system, as a means of making intelligible the evolution of Australian totemic society, is proposed by the present writer. We may suggest that men originally lived in the state of “the Cyclopean family” of Atkinson; that is, in Darwin’s “family group,” containing Lang’s system. but one adult male, with the females, the adolescent males being driven out, to find each a female mate, or mates, elsewhere if they can. With increase of skill, improvements in implements and mitigation of ferocity, such groups may become larger, in a given area, but men may retain the habit of seeking mates outside the limits of the group of contiguity; the “avoidance” of brothers and sisters may already have arisen. Among the advanced Arunta, now, a man may speak freely to his elder sisters; to younger sisters, or “tribal sisters,” he may not speak, “or only at such a distance that the features are indistinguishable.” This archaic rule of avoidance would be a step facilitating the permission to adult males to dwell in their paternal group, avoiding their sisters. Such groups, whether habitually exogamous or not, will require names for each other, and various reasons would yield a preference to names derived from animals. These are easily signalled in gesture language; are easily presented in pictographs and tattooing; are even now, among savages and boys, the most usual sort of personal nicknames; and are widely employed as group names of villagers in European folk-lore. Among European rustics such group sobriquets are usual, but are resented. The savage, with his ideas of the equality or superiority of animals to himself, sees nothing to resent in an animal sobriquet, and the names, originally group sobriquets, would not find more difficulty in being accepted than “Whig,” “Tory,” “Huguenot,” “Cavalier,” “Christian,” “Cameronian,”—all of them originally nicknames given from without. Again, “Wry Nose” and “Crooked Mouth” are derisive nicknames, but they are the translations of the ancient Celtic clan names Cameron and Campbell. The nicknames “Naked Dogs,” “Liars,” “Buffalo Dung,” “Men who do not laugh,” “Big Topknots,” have been thoroughly accepted by the “gentes” of the Blackfoot Indians, now passing out of Totemism (Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales, pp. 208-225).
As Howitt writes, “the assumption of the names of objects by men must in fact have been the origin of totemism.” Howitt does not admit the theory that the totem names came to arise in this way, but this way is a vera causa. Names must be given either from within or from without. A group, in savagery, has no need of a name for itself; “we” are “we,” or are “The Men”; for all other adjacent groups names are needed. The name of one totem, Thaballa, “The Laughing Boy” totem, among the Warramunga and another tribe, is quite transparently a nickname, as is Karti, “The Grown-up Men” (Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 207).
There is nothing, prima facie, which renders this origin of animal, plant and other such names for early savage groups at all improbable. They would not even be resented, as now are the animal names for villagers in the Orkneys, the Channel Islands, France, Cornwall and in ancient Israel (for examples see Social Origins, pp. 295-301). The names once accepted, and their origin forgotten, would be inevitably regarded as implying a mystic rapport between the bestial and the human namesakes, Crow, Eagle Hawk, Grub, Bandicoot, Opossum, Emu, Kangaroo and so on (see Name). On this subject it is enough to cite J. G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough (2nd ed., vol. i. pp. 404-446). Here will be found a rich and satisfactory collection of proof that community of name implies mystic rapport. Professor Rhys is quoted for the statement that probably “the whole Aryan race believed at one time not only that the name was a part of the man, but that it was that part of him which is termed the soul.” In such a mental stage the men “Crows” identify themselves with the actual Crow species: the birds are now “of their flesh,” are fabled to be their ancestors, or the men have been evolved out of the birds. The Crow is sacro-sanct, a friend and protector, and a centre of taboos, one of which is the prohibition preventing a Crow man from intercourse with a Crow woman, “however far apart their hunting grounds may have been.” All men and women Crows are recognized as brothers and sisters in the Crow, and are not intermarriageable.
On these lines the prohibition to infringe the totem taboo by marriage within the totem name is intelligible, but the system of phratries has yet to be accounted for. It is obvious that the names could only have been given originally to local groups: the people who held this or that local habitation received the name. Suppose that the rule of each such group, or heart circle, had been “no marriage within the local group or camp,” as in Atkinson’s scheme. When the groups accept their new names, the rule becomes, “no marriage within local group Eagle Hawk, group Crow,” and so on. So far the animal giving the group name may not yet have become a revered totem. The result of the rule would inevitably be, in three or four generations, that in groups Crow or Eagle Hawk, there were no Crows or Eagle Hawks by descent, if the children took the names of descent from their mothers; for the sake of differentiation: the Ant woman’s children in local group Crow being Ants, the Grub woman’s children being Grubs, the Eagle Hawk woman’s children being Eagle Hawks,—all in local group Crow, and inheriting the names of the local groups whence their mothers were brought into local group Crow.
By this means (indicated first by McLennan) each member of a local group would have a local group name, say Eagle Hawk, and a name by female descent, say Kangaroo, in addition, as now, to his or her personal name. In this way, all members of each local group would find, in any other local group, people of his name of descent, and, as the totem belief grew to maturity, kinsmen of his in the totem. When this fact was realized, it would inevitably make for peace among all contiguous groups. In place of taking women by force, at the risk of shedding kindred blood, peaceful betrothals between men and women of different local group names and of different names by descent could be arranged. Say that local groups Eagle Hawk and Crow took the lead in this arrangement of alliance and connubium, and that (as they would naturally flourish in the strength conferred by union) the other local groups came into it, ranging themselves under Eagle Hawk and Crow, we should have the existing primitive type of organization: Local Groups Eagle Hawk (Mukwara) and Crow (Kilpara) would have become the widely diffused phratries, Mukwara and Kilpara, with all the totem kins within them.
But, on these lines, some members of any totem kin, say Cat, would be in phratry Eagle Hawk, some would be in phratry Kilpara as now (for the different reason already indicated) among the Arunta. Such persons were in a quandary. By phratry law, as being in opposite phratries, a Cat in Eagle Hawk phratry could marry a Cat in Crow phratry. But, by totem law, this was impossible. To avoid the clash of law, all Cats had to go into one phratry or the other, either into Eagle Hawk or into Crow.
Two whole totem kins were in the same unhappy position. The persons who were Eagle Hawks by descent could not be in Eagle Hawk local group, now phratry, as we have already shown. They were in Crow phratry, they could not, by phratry law, marry in their own phratry, and to marry in Eagle Hawk was to break the old law, “no marriage within the local group name.” Their only chance was to return to Eagle Hawk phratry, while Crow totem kin went into Crow phratry, and thus we often find, in fact, that in Australian phratries Mukwara (Eagle Hawk) there is a totem kin Eagle Hawk, and in Kilpara phratry (Crow) there is a totem kin Crow. This arrangement—the totem kin within the phratry of its own name—has long been known to exist in America. The Thlinkets have Raven phratry, with totem kins Raven, Frog, Goose, &c., and Wolf phratry, with
