Andrew Lang

The Secret of the Totem Andrew Lang

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.