The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

[284] Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., pp. 168, 537, 540.

[285]Ibid., p. 174.

[286] Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, I, p. 99 n.

[287] Brough Smyth, I, p. 284. Strehlow cites a fact of the same sort among the Arunta (III, p. 68).

[288]An Account of the English Colony in N.S. Wales, II, p. 381.

[289] Krause, p. 237.

[290] Swanton, Social Condition, Beliefs and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians, in XXVIth Rep., pp. 435 ff.; Boas, The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, p. 358.

[291] Frazer, Totemism, p. 26.

[292] Bourke, The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, p. 229; J. W. Fewkes, The Group of Tusayan Ceremonials called Katcinas, in XVth Rep., 1897, pp. 151-263.

[293] Müller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 327.

[294] Schoolcraft, op. cit., III, p. 269.

[295] Dorsey, Omaha Sociol., Third Rep., pp. 229, 238, 240, 245.

[296] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 451.

[297] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 257.

[298] The meaning of these relations will be seen below (Bk. II, ch. iv).

[299] Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 296.

[300] Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 744-746; cf. p. 129.

[301]Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 66 n. It is true that other informers contest this fact.

[302] Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 744.

[303] Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, pp. 41 ff., Pl. XX and XXI; Boas, The Social Organization of the Kwakiutl, p. 318; Swanton, Tlingit, Pl. XVI ff.—In one place, outside the two ethnographic regions which we are specially studying, these tattooings are put on the animals which belong to the clan. The Bechuana of South Africa are divided into a certain number of clans; there are the people of the crocodile, the buffalo, the monkey, etc. Now the crocodile people, for example, make an incision in the ears of their cattle whose form is like the jaws of this animal (Casalis, Les Basoutos, p. 221). According to Robertson Smith, the same custom existed among the ancient Arabs (Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, pp. 212-214).

[304] However, according to Spencer and Gillen, there are some which have no religious sense (see Nat. Tr., pp. 41 f.; Nor. Tr., pp. 45, 54-56).

[305] Among the Arunta, this rule has exceptions which will be explained below.

[306] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 162; Nor. Tr., pp. 179, 259, 292, 295 f.; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 221. The thing thus represented is not always the totem itself, but one of those things which, being associated to this totem, are regarded as being in the same family of things.

[307] This is the case, for example, among the Warramunga, the Walpari, the Wulmala, the Tjingilli, the Umbaia and the Unmatjera (Nor. Tr., 339, 348). Among the Warramunga, at the moment when the design is executed, the performers address the initiated with the following words: "That mark belongs to your place; do not look out along another place." "This means," say Spencer and Gillen, "that the young man must not interfere with ceremonies belonging to other totems than his own: it also indicates the very close association which is supposed to exist between a man and his totem and any spot especially connected with the totem" (Nor. Tr., p. 584 and n.). Among the Warramunga, the totem is transmitted from father to child, so each locality has its own.

[308] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 215, 241, 376.

[309] It will be remembered (see above, p. 107) that in this tribe, the child may have a different totem than his father, his mother, or his relatives in general. Now the relatives on both sides are the performers designated for the ceremonies of initiation. Consequently, since in principle a man can have the quality of performer or officiant only for the ceremonies of his own totem, it follows that in certain cases the rites by which the young man is initiated must be in connection with a totem that is not his own. That is why the paintings made on the body of the novice do not necessarily represent his own totem: cases of this sort will be found in Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 229. That there is an anomaly here is well shown by the fact that the circumcision falls to the totem which predominates in the local group of the initiate, that is to say, to the one which would be the totem of the initiate himself, if the totemic organization were not disturbed, if among the Arunta it were what it is among the Warramunga (see Spencer and Gillen, ibid., p. 219).

The same disturbance has had another consequence. In a general way, its effect is to extend a little the bonds attaching each totem to a special group, since each totem may have members in all the local groups possible, and even in the two phratries. The idea that these ceremonies of a totem might be celebrated by an individual of another totem—an idea which is contrary to the very principles of totemism, as we shall see better after a while—has thus been accepted without too much resistance. It has been admitted that a man to whom a spirit revealed the formula for a ceremony had the right of presiding over it, even when he was not of the totem in question himself (Nat. Tr., p. 519). But that this is an exception to the rule and the product of a sort of toleration is proved by the fact that the beneficiary of the formula does not have the free disposition of it; if he transmits it—and these transmissions are frequent—it can be only to a member of the totem which the rite concerns (Nat. Tr., ibid.).

[310]Nat. Tr., p. 140. In this case, the novice keeps the decoration with which he has thus been adorned until it disappears of itself by the effect of time.

[311] Boas, General Report on the Indians of British Columbia in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fifth Rep. of the Committee on the N.W. Tribes of the Dominion of Canada, p. 41.

[312] There are also some among the Warramunga, but in smaller numbers than among the Arunta; they do not figure in the totemic ceremonies, though they do have a place in the myths (Nor. Tr., p. 163).

[313] Other names are used by other tribes. We give a generic sense to the Arunta term because it is in this tribe that the churinga have the most important place and have been studied the best.

[314] Strehlow, II, p. 81.

[315] There are a few which have no apparent design (see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 144).

[316]Nat. Tr., pp. 139 and 648; Strehlow, II, p. 75.

[317] Strehlow, who writes tjurunga, gives a slightly different translation to the word. "This word," he says, "means that which is secret and personal (der eigene geheime). Tju is an old word which means hidden or secret, and runga means that which is my own." But Kempe, who has more authority than Strehlow in this matter, translates tju by great, powerful, sacred (Kempe, Vocabulary of the Tribes inhabiting Macdonell Ranges, s.v. Tju, in Transactions of the R. Society of Victoria, Vol. XIII). At bottom, the translation of Strehlow is not so different from the other as might appear at first glance, for what is secret is hidden from the knowledge of the profane, that is, it is sacred. As for the meaning given to runga, it appears to us very doubtful. The ceremonies of the emu belong to all the members of that clan; all may participate in them; therefore they are not personal to any one of them.

[318]Nat. Tr., pp. 130-132; Strehlow, II, p. 78. A woman who has seen a churinga or a man who has shown one to her are both put to death.

[319] Strehlow calls this place, defined in exactly the same terms as by Spencer and Gillen, arknanaua instead of ertnatulunga (Strehlow, II, p. 78).

[320]Nor. Tr., p. 270; Nat. Tr., p. 140.

[321]Nat. Tr., p. 135.

[322] Strehlow, II, p. 78. However, Strehlow says that if a murderer takes refuge near an ertnatulunga, he is unpityingly pursued there and put to death. We find some difficulty in conciliating this fact with the privilege enjoyed by animals, and ask ourselves if the rigour with which a criminal is treated is not something recent and should not be attributed to a weakening of the taboo which originally protected the ertnatulunga.