Myth, Ritual and Religion (Vol. 1&2). Andrew Lang

on the same footing as men and everything else in the world. Precisely similar evidence comes from South America. In this case our best authority is almost beyond suspicion. He knew the native languages well, being himself a half-caste. He was learned in the European learning of his time; and as a son of the Incas, he had access to all surviving Peruvian stores of knowledge, and could collect without difficulty the testimonies of his countrymen. It will be seen(2) that Don Garcilasso de la Vega could estimate evidence, and ridiculed the rough methods and fallacious guesses of Spanish inquirers. Garcilasso de la Vega was born about 1540, being the son of an Inca princess and of a Spanish conqueror. His book, Commentarias Reales,(3) was expressly intended to rectify the errors of such Spanish writers as Acosta. In his account of Peruvian religion, Garcilasso distinguishes between the beliefs of the tribes previous to the rise of the Inca empire and the sun-worship of the Incas. But it is plain, from Garcilasso's own account and from other evidence, that under the Incas the older faiths and fetichisms survived, in subordination to sun-worship, just as Pagan superstitions survived in custom and folk-lore after the official recognition of Christianity. Sun-worship, in Peru, and the belief in a Supreme Creator there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise with the lower beliefs, and to have been content to allow a certain amount of bowing down in the temples of the elder faiths. According, then, to Garcilasso's account of Peruvian totemism, "An Indian was not looked upon as honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river,(4) or lake, or even from the sea, OR FROM A WILD ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey ".(5) A certain amount of worship was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts and natural objects. Men offered up to their totems "what they usually saw them eat".(6) On the seacoasts "they worshipped sardines, skates, dog-fish, and, for want of larger gods, crabs. … There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god," including "lizards, toads and frogs." Garcilasso (who says they ate the fish they worshipped) gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the beginning men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one human stock from another. "The one desired to have a god different from the other. … They only thought of making one different from another." When the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed "splendour and beauty" as contrasted with "the ugliness and filth of the frogs and other vermin they looked upon as gods".(7) Garcilasso, of course, does not use the North American word totem (or ote or otem) for the family badge which represented the family ancestors. He calls these things, as a general rule, pacarissa. The sun was the pacarissa of the Incas, as it was of the chief of the Natchez. The pacarissa of other stocks was the lion, bear, frog, or what not. Garcilasso accounts for the belief accorded to the Incas, when they claimed actual descent from the sun, by observing(8) that "there were tribes among their subjects who professed similar fabulous descents, though they did not comprehend how to select ancestors so well as the Incas, but adored animals and other low and earthly objects". As to the fact of the Peruvian worship of beasts, if more evidence is wanted, it is given, among others, by Cieza de Leon,(9) who contrasts the adoration of the Roman gods with that offered in Peru to brutes. "In the important temple of Pacha-camac (the spiritual deity of Peru) they worshipped a she-fox or vixen and an emerald." The devil also "appeared to them and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce". Other examples of totemism in South America may be studied in the tribes on the Amazon.(10) Mr. Wallace found the Pineapple stock, the Mosquitoes, Woodpeckers, Herons, and other totem kindreds. A curious example of similar ideas is discovered among the Bonis of Guiana. These people were originally West Coast Africans imported as slaves, who have won their freedom with the sword. While they retain a rough belief in Gadou (God) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided into totem stocks with animal names. The red ape, turtle and cayman are among the chief totems.(11)

      (1) Kip, ii. 288.

      (2) Appendix B.

      (3) See translation in Hakluyt Society's Collection.

      (4) Like many Greek heroes. Odyssey, iii. 489. "Orsilochus, the child begotten of Alpheus."

      (5) Comm. Real., i. 75.

      (6) Ibid., 53.

      (7) Ibid., 102.

      (8) Ibid., 83.

      (9) Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 183.

      (10) Acuna, p. 103; Wallace, Travels on Amazon (1853), pp. 481–506.

      (11) Crevaux, Voyages dans l'Amerique du Sud, p. 59.

      After this hasty examination of the confused belief in kinship with animals and other natural objects which underlies institutions in Australia, West and South Africa, North and South America, we may glance at similar notions among the non-Aryan races of India. In Dalton's Ethnology of Bengal,(1) he tells us that the Garo clans are divided into maharis or motherhoods. Children belong to the mahari of the mother, just as (in general) they derive their stock name and totem from the mother's side in Australia and among the North American Indians. No man may marry (as among the Red Indians and Australians) a woman belonging to his own stock, motherhood or mahari. So far the maharis of Bengal exactly correspond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis also take their names from plants and animals, and so forth? We know that the Killis, similar communities among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this.(2) "The Mundaris, like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal distinction the name of some animal, and the flesh of that animal is tabooed to them as food; for example, the eel, the tortoise." This is exactly the state of things in Ashanti. Dalton mentions also(3) a princely family in Nagpur which claims descent from "a great hooded snake". Among the Oraons he found(4) tribes which might not eat young mice (considered a dainty) or tortoises, and a stock which might not eat the oil of the tree which was their totem, nor even sit in its shade. "The family or tribal names" (within which they may not marry) "are usually those of animals or plants, and when this is the case, the flesh of some part of the animal or the fruit of the tree is tabooed to the tribe called after it."

      (1) Dalton, p. 63.

      (2) Ibid., p. 189.

      (3) Ibid., p. 166.

      (4) Ibid., p. 254.

      An excellent sketch of totemism in India is given by Mr. H. H. Risley of the Bengal Civil Service:—(1)

      (1) The Asiatic Quarterly, No. 3, Essay on "Primitive Marriage in Bengal."

      "At the bottom of the social system, as understood by the average Hindu, stands a large body of non-Aryan castes and tribes, each of which is broken up into a number of what may be called totemistic exogamous septs. Each sept bears the name of an animal, a tree, a plant, or of some material object, natural or artificial, which the members of that sept are prohibited from killing, eating, cutting, burning, carrying, using, etc."(1)

      (1) Here we may note that the origin of exogamy itself is merely part of a strict totemistic prohibition. A man may not "use" an object within the totem kin, nor a woman of the kin. Compare the Greek idiom (Greek text omitted).

      Mr. Risley finds that both Kolarians, as the Sonthals, and Dravidians, as the Oraons, are in this state of totemism, like the Hos and Mundas. It is most instructive to learn that, as one of these tribes rises in the social scale, it sloughs off its totem, and, abandoning the common name derived from bird, beast, or plant, adopts that of an eponymous ancestor. A tendency in this direction has been observed by Messrs. Fison and Howitt even in Australia. The Mahilis, Koras and Kurmis, who profess to be members of the Hindu community, still retain the totemistic organisation, with names derived from birds, beasts and plants. Even the Jagannathi Kumhars of Orissa, taking rank immediately below the writer-caste, have the totems tiger, snake, weasel, cow, frog, sparrow and tortoise. The sub-castes of the Khatlya Kumhars explain away their totem-names "as names of certain saints, who, being present at Daksha's Horse-sacrifice, transformed themselves into animals to escape the wrath of Siva," like the gods of Egypt when they fled in bestial form from the wrath of Set.

      Among the non-Aryan tribes the marriage law has the totemistic sanction. No man may marry a woman of his totem kin. When the totem-name is changed for an eponym, the non-Aryan, rising in the social scale, is practically in the same position as the Brahmans, "divided into exogamous sections (gotras), the members of which profess to be descended