 CHAPTER III. ANIMISM, MAGIC, AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT Section 1. It is a necessary defect of studies which seek to apply the point of view of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences that they cannot do justice to either subject. They therefore confine themselves to the role of incentives and make suggestions to the expert, which he should take into consideration in his work. This defect will make itself felt most strongly in an essay such as this, which tries to treat of the enormous sphere called animism. Footnote. The necessary crowding of the material also compels us to dispense with a thorough bibliography. Instead of this, the reader is referred to the well-known works of Herbert Spencer, J.G. Fraser, A. Lang, E. B. Tyler, and W. W. Wunt, from which all the statements concerning animism and magic are taken. The independence of the author can manifest itself only in the choice of the material and of opinions. Footnote. Animism in the narrower sense is the theory of psychic concepts and in the wider sense of spiritual beings in general. Animatism, the animation theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a further subdivision which also includes animatism and animism. The name animism, formerly applied to a definite philosophic system, seems to have acquired its present meaning through E. B. Tyler. What led to the formulation of these names is the insight into the very remarkable conceptions of nature and the world of those primitive races known to us from history and from our own times. These races populate the world with a multitude of spiritual beings which are benevolent or malevolent to them and attribute the causation of natural processes to these spirits and demons. They also consider that not only animals and plants, but inanimate things as well, are animated by them. A third and perhaps the most important part of this primitive nature philosophy seems far less striking to us because we ourselves are not yet far enough removed from it. Though we have greatly limited the existence of spirits and today explain the processes of nature by the assumption of impersonal physical forces. For primitive people believe in a similar animation of human individuals as well. Human beings have souls which can leave their habitation and enter into other beings. These souls are the bearers of spiritual activities and are to a certain extent independent of the bodies. Originally souls were thought of as beings very similar to individuals. Only in the course of a long evolution did they lose their material character and attain a higher degree of spiritualization. Most authors inclined to the assumption that these soul conceptions are the original nucleus of the animistic system. That spirits merely correspond to souls that have become independent and that the souls of animals, plants and things were formed after the analogy of human souls. How did primitive people come to the peculiarly dualistic fundamental conceptions on which this animistic system rests? Through the observation it is thought of the phenomena of sleep with dreams and death which resemble sleep. And through the effort to explain these conditions which affect each individual so intimately. Above all the problem of death must have become the starting point of the formation of the theory. To primitive man the continuation of life immortality would be self-evident. The conception of death is something accepted later and only with hesitation for even to us it is still devoid of content and unrealizable. Very likely discussions have taken place over the part which may have been played by other observations and experiences in the formation of the fundamental animistic conceptions such as dream imagery, shadows and reflections. But these have led to no conclusions. If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that stimulated his reflection with the formation of conceptions of the soul and then transferred these to objects of the outer world his attitude will be judged to be quite natural and in no way mysterious. In view of the fact that animistic conceptions have been shown to be similar among the most varied races and in all periods once states that these quote are the necessary psychological product of the myth-forming consciousness and primitive animism may be looked upon as the spiritual expression of man's natural state insofar as this is at all accessible to our observation. Hume has already justified the animation of the inanimate in his natural history of religions where he said quote there is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious end quote animism is a system of thought it gives not only the explanation of a single phenomenon but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of the world from one point as a continuity writers maintain that in the course of time three such systems of thought three great world systems came into being the animistic mythological the religious and the scientific of these animism the first system is perhaps the most consistent and the most exhaustive and the one which explains the nature of the world in its entirety this first world system of mankind is now a psychological theory it would go beyond our scope to show how much of it can still be demonstrated in the life of today either as a worthless survival in the form of superstition or in living form as the foundation of our language our belief and our philosophy it is in reference to the successive stages of these three world systems that we say that animism in itself was not yet a religion but contained the prerequisites from which religions were later formed it is also evident that myths are based upon animistic foundations but the detailed relation of myths to animism seem unexplained in some essential points section two our psychoanalytic work will begin at a different point it must not be assumed that mankind came to create its first world system through a purely speculative thirst for knowledge the practical need of mastering the world must have contributed to this effort we are therefore not astonished to learn that something else went hand in hand with the animistic system namely the elaboration of directions for making oneself master of men animals and things as well as of their spirits s reineck wants to call these directions which are known under the names of sorcery and magic the strategy of animism with moss and hubert i should prefer to compare them to a technique can the conceptions of sorcery and magic be separated it can be done if we are willing on our own authority to put ourselves above the vagaries of linguistic usage then sorcery is essentially the art of influencing spirits by treating them like people under the same circumstances that is to say by appeasing them reconciling them making them more favorably disposed to one by intimidating them by depriving them of their power and by making them subject to one's will all that is accomplished through the same methods that have been found effective with living people magic however is something else it does not essentially concern itself with spirits and uses special means not the ordinary psychological method we can easily guess that magic is the earlier and the more important part of animistic technique for among the means with which spirits are to be treated there are also found the magic kind and magic is also applied where spiritualization of nature has not yet as it seems to us been accomplished magic must serve the most varied purposes it must subject the processes of nature to the will of man protect the individual against enemies and dangers and give him the power to injure his enemies but the principles on whose assumptions the magic activity is based or rather the principle of magic is so evident that it was recognized by all authors if we may take the opinion of eb tyler at its face value it can be most tersely expressed in his words quote mistaking an ideal connection for a real one end quote we shall explain this characteristic in the case of two groups of magic acts one of the most widespread magic procedures for injuring an enemy consists of making an effigy of him out of any kind of material the likeness counts for little in fact any object may be named as his image whatever is subsequently done to this image will also happen to the hated prototype thus if the effigy has been injured in any place he will be afflicted by a disease in the corresponding part of the body this same magic technique instead of being used for private enmity can also be employed for pious purposes and can thus be used to aid the gods against evil demons i quote phraser every night when the sun god ra in ancient egypt sank to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the archfiend apepi all night long he fought them and sometimes by day the powers of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue egyptian sky to obscure his light and weaken his power to aid the sun god in this daily struggle a ceremony was daily performed in his temple at thieves a figure of his foe apepi represented as a crocodile with the hideous face or a serpent with many coils was made of wax and on it the demon's name was written in green ink wrapped in a papyrus case on which another likeness of apepi had been drawn in green ink the figure was then tied up with black hair spat upon hacked with a stone knife and cast on the ground there the priest trod on it with his left foot again and again and then burned it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass when apepi himself had thus been effectively disposed of wax and effigies of each of his principal demons and of their fathers mothers and children were made and burnt in the same way the service accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells was repeated not merely morning noon at night but whenever a storm was raging or heavy rain had set in or black clouds were stealing across the sky to hide the sun's bright disc the fiends of darkness clouds and rain felt the injury inflicted on their images as if it had been done to themselves they passed away at least for a time and the beneficent sun god shown out triumphant once more end quote there is a great mass of magic actions which show a similar motivation but i shall lay stress upon only two which have always played a great role among primitive races which have been partly preserved in myths and cults of higher stages of evolution the art of causing rain and fruitfulness by magic rain is produced by magic means by imitating it and perhaps also by imitating the clouds in storm which produce it it looks as if they wanted to play rain the anus of japan for instance make rain by pouring out water through a big sieve while others fit out a big bowl with sails and oars as if it were a ship which is then dragged about the village and gardens but the fruitfulness of the soil was assured by magic means by showing it the spectacle of human sexual intercourse to cite one out of many examples in some part of java the peasants used to go out into the fields at night for sexual intercourse when the rice was about to blossom in order to stimulate the rice to fruitfulness through example at the same time it was feared that prescribed incestuous relationships would stimulate the soil to grow weeds and render it unfruitful certain negative rules that is to say magic precautions must be put into this first group if some of the inhabitants of the dayak village had set out on a hunt for wild boars those remaining behind were in the meantime not permitted to touch either oil or water with their hands as such acts would soften the hunter's fingers and would let the quarry slip through their hands or when a gilliac hunter was pursuing game in the woods his children were forbidden to make drawings on wood or in the sand as the paths in the thick woods might become as intertwined as the lines of the drawing and the hunter would not find his way home the fact that in these as in a great many other examples of magic influence distance plays no part telepathy is taken as a matter of course will cause us no difficulty in grasping the peculiarity of magic there is no doubt about what is considered the effective force in all these examples it is the similarity between the performed action and the expected happening phraser therefore calls this kind of magic imitative or homeopathic if i want it to rain i only have to produce something that looks like rain or recalls rain in a later phase of cultural development instead of these magic conjurations of rain processions are arranged to a house of god in order to supplicate the saint who dwells there to send rain finally also this religious technique will be given up and instead an effort will be made to find out what would influence the atmosphere to produce rain in another group of magic actions the principle of similarity is no longer involved but in its stead there is another principle the nature of which is well brought out in the following examples another method may be used to injure an enemy you possess yourself of his hair his nails anything that he has discarded or even a part of his clothing and do something hostile to these things this is just as effective as if you had dominated the person himself and anything that you do to the things that belong to him must happen to him too according to the conception of primitive men a name is an essential part of a personality if therefore you know the name of a person or a spirit you have acquired a certain power over its bearer this explains the remarkable precautions and restrictions in the use of names which we have touched upon in the essay on taboo in these examples similarity is evidently replaced by relationship the cannibalism of primitive races derives its more sublime motivation in a similar manner by absorbing parts of the body of a person through the act of eating we also come to possess the properties which belong to to that person from this their follow precautions and restrictions as to diet under special circumstances thus a pregnant woman will avoid eating the meat of certain animals because their undesirable properties for example cowardice might thus be transferred to the child she is nourishing it makes no difference to the magic influence whether the connection is already abolished or whether it had consisted of only one very important contact thus for instance the belief in a magic bond which links the fate of a wound with the weapon which caused it can be followed unchanged through thousands of years if a Melanesian gets possession of the bow by which he was wounded he will carefully keep it in a cool place in order thus to keep down the inflammation of the wound but if the bow has remained in the possession of the enemy it will certainly be kept in close proximity to a fire in order that the wound may burn and become thoroughly inflamed Pliny in his natural history 28 advises spitting on the hand which has caused the injury if one regrets having injured someone the pain of the injured person will then immediately be eased Francis Bacon in his natural history mentions the generally accredited belief that putting a sab on the weapon which has made a wound will cause this wound to heal of itself it is said that even today English peasants follow this prescription and that if they have cut themselves with a scythe they will from that moment on carefully keep the instrument clean in order that the wound may not fester in June 1902 a local English weekly reported that a woman called Matilde Henry of Norwich accidentally ran an iron nail into the sole of her foot without having the wound examined or even taking off her stocking she banned her daughter to oil the nail thoroughly in the expectation that then nothing could happen to her she died a few days later of tetanus in consequence of postponed antisepsis the examples from this last group illustrate Fraser's distinction between contagious magic and imitative magic what is considered as effective in these examples is no longer the similarity but the association in space the contiguity or at least the imagined contiguity or the memory of its existence but since similarity and contiguity are the two essential principles of the processes of association of ideas it must be concluded that the dominance of associations of ideas really explains all the madness of the rules of magic we can see how true Tyler's quoted characteristic of magic mistaking an ideal connection for a real one proves to be the same maybe set of Fraser's idea who is expressed it in almost the same terms quote men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature and hence imagine that the control which they have or seem to have over their thoughts permitted them to have a corresponding control over things and quote it will at first seem strange that this illuminating explanation of magic could have been rejected by some authors as unsatisfactory but on closer consideration we must sustain the objection that the association theory of magic merely explains the path that magic travels and not its essential nature that is it does not explain the misunderstanding which bids it put psychological laws in place of natural ones we are apparently in need here of a dynamic factor but while the search for this leads the critics of Fraser's theory astray it will be easy to give a satisfactory explanation of magic by carrying its association theory further and by entering more deeply into it first let us examine the simpler and more important case of imitative magic according to Fraser this may be practiced by itself whereas contagious magic as a rule presupposes the imitative the motives which impel one to exercise magic are easily recognized they are the wishes of men we need only assume that primitive man had great confidence in the power of his wishes at bottom everything which he accomplished by magic means must have been done solely because he wanted it thus in the beginning only his wish is accentuated in the case of the child which finds itself under analogous psychic conditions without being as yet capable of motor activity we have elsewhere advocated the assumption that it at first really satisfies its wishes by means of hallucinations in that it creates the satisfying situation through centrifugal excitements of its sensory organs the adult primitive man knows another way a motor impulse the will clings to his wish and this will which later will change the face of the earth in the service of wish fulfillment is now used to represent the gratification so that one may experience it as it were through motor hallucination such a representation of the gratified wish is altogether comparable to the play of children where it replaces the purely sensory technique of gratification if play and imitative representation suffice for the child and for primitive man it must not be taken as a sign of modesty in our sense or a resignation due to the realization of their impotence on the contrary it is the very obvious result of the excessive valuation of their wish of the will which depends upon the wish and of the paths the wish takes in time the psychic accent is displaced from the motives of the magic act to its means namely to the act itself perhaps it would be more correct to say that primitive man does not become aware of the overvaluation of his psychic acts until it becomes evident to him through the means employed it would also seem as if it were the magic act itself which compels the fulfillment of the wish by virtue of its similarity to the object desired at the stage of animistic thinking there is as yet no way of demonstrating objectively the true state of affairs but this becomes possible at later stages when those such procedures are still practiced the psychic phenomenon of skepticism already manifests itself as a tendency to repression at that stage men will acknowledge that the conjuration of spirit avails nothing unless accompanied by belief and that the magic effect of prayer fails if there is no piety behind it the possibility of a contagious magic which depends upon contiguous association will then show us that the psychic valuation of the wish and the will has been extended to all psychic acts which the will can command we may say that at present there is a general overvaluation of all psychic processes that is to say there is an attitude towards the world which according to our understanding of the relation of reality to thought must appear like an overestimation of the latter objects as such are overshadowed by the ideas representing them what takes place in the latter must also happen to the former and the relations which exist between ideas are also postulated as two things as thought does not recognize distances and easily brings together in one act of consciousness things spatially and temporally far removed the magic world also puts itself above spatial distance by telepathy and treats a past association as if it were a present one in the animistic age the reflection of the inner world must obscure that other picture of the world which we believe we recognize let us also point out that the two principles of association similarity and contiguity meet in the higher unity of contact association by contiguity is contact in the direct sense an association by similarity is contact in the transferred sense another identity in the psychic process which has not yet been grasped by us is probably concealed in the use of the same word for both kinds of associations it is the same range of the concept of contact which we have found in the analysis of taboo it's summing up we may now say that the principle which controls magic and the technique of the animistic method of thought is omnipotence of thought section three i have adopted the term omnipotence of thought from a highly intelligent man a former sufferer from compulsion neurosis who after being cured through psychoanalytic treatment was able to demonstrate his efficiency and good sense he had coined this phrase to designate all those peculiar and uncanny occurrences which seemed to pursue him just as they pursue others afflicted with his malady thus if he happened to think of a person he was actually confronted with this person as if he had conjured him up if he inquired suddenly about the state of health of an acquaintance whom he had long missed he was sure to hear that this acquaintance had just died so that he could believe that the deceased had drawn his attention to himself by telepathic means if he uttered a half meant implication against a stranger he could expect to have him die soon thereafter and burden him with the responsibility for his death he was able to explain most of these cases in the course of the treatment he could tell how the illusion had originated and what he himself had contributed towards furthering his superstitious expectations all compulsion neurotics are superstitious in this manner and often against their better judgment the existence of omnipotence of thought is most clearly seen in compulsion neurosis for the results of this primitive method of thought are most often found or met in consciousness but we must guard against seeing in this a distinguishing characteristic of this neurosis for analytic investigation reveals the same mechanism in other neuroses in every one of the neuroses it is not the reality of the experience but the reality of the thought which forms the basis for the symptom formation neurotics live in a special world in which as I have elsewhere expressed it only the neurotic standard of currency counts that is to say only things intensively thought of or effectively conceived are effective with them regardless of whether these things are in harmony with outer reality the hysteric repeats in his attacks and fixates through his symptoms occurrences which have taken place only in his fantasy though in the last analysis they go back to real events or have been built up from them the neurotics guilty conscience is just as incomprehensible if traced to real misdeeds a compulsion neurotic may be oppressed by a sense of guilt which is appropriate to a wholesale murderer while at the same time he acts toward his fellow beings in a most considerate and scrupulous manner a behavior which he events since his childhood and yet his sense of guilt is justified it is based upon intensive and frequent death wishes which unconsciously manifest themselves toward his fellow beings it is motivated from the point of view of unconscious thoughts but not of intentional acts thus the omnipotence of thought the overestimation of psychic processes as opposed to reality proves to be of unlimited effect in the neurotic's effective life and in all that emanates from it but if we subject him to psychoanalytic treatment which makes his unconscious thoughts conscious to him he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and is always afraid to express evil wishes lest they be fulfilled in consequence of his utterance but through this attitude as well as through the superstition which plays an active part in his life he reveals to us how close he stands to the savage who believes he can change the outer world by a mere thought of his the primary obsessive actions of these neurotics are really altogether of a magical nature if not magic they are at least anti-magic and are destined to ward off the expectation of evil with which the neurosis is want to begin whenever i was able to pierce these secrets it turned out that the content of this expectation of evil was death according to Schopenhauer the problem of death stands at the beginning of every philosophy we have heard that the formation of the soul conception and of the belief in demons which characterize animism are also traced back to the impression which death makes upon man it is hard to decide whether these first compulsive and protective actions follow the principle of similarity or of contrast for under the conditions of the neurosis they are usually distorted through displacement upon some trifle upon some action which in itself is quite insignificant the protective formulas of the compulsion neurosis also have a counterpart in the incantations of magic but the evolution of compulsive actions may be described by pointing out how these actions begin as a spell against evil wishes which are very remote from anything sexual only to end up as a substitute for forbidden sexual activity which they imitate as faithfully as possible if we accept the evolution of man's conceptions of the universe mentioned above according to which the animistic phase is succeeded by the religious and this in turn by the scientific we have no difficulty in following the fortunes of the omnipotence of thought through all these phases in the animistic stage man ascribes omnipotence to himself in the religious he has ceded it to the gods but without seriously giving it up for he reserves to himself the right to control the gods by influencing them in some way or other in the interest of his wishes in the scientific attitude towards life there is no longer any room for man's omnipotence he has acknowledged his smallness and has submitted to death as to all other natural necessities in a spirit of resignation nevertheless in our reliance upon the power of the human spirit which copes with the laws of reality there still lives on a fragment of this primitive belief in the omnipotence of thought in retracing the development of libidinous impulses in the individual from its mature form back to its first beginnings in childhood we at first found an important distinction which is stated in the three contributions to the theory of sex the manifestations of sexual impulses can be recognized from the beginning but at first they are not yet directed to any outer object each individual component of the sexual impulse works for a gain in pleasure and finds its gratification in its own body this stage is called auto eroticism and is distinguished from the stage of object selection in the course of further study it proved to be practical and really necessary to insert a third stage between these two or if one prefers to divide the first stage of auto eroticism into two in this intermediary stage the importance of which increases the more we investigate it the sexual impulses which formerly were separate have already formed into a unit and have also found an object but this object is not external and foreign to the individual but is his own ego which is formed at this period this new stage is called narcissism in view of the pathological fixation of this condition which may be observed later on the individual acts as if he were in love with himself for the purposes of our analysis the ego impulses and the libidinous wishes cannot yet be separated from each other although this narcissistic stage in which the hitherto dissociated sexual impulses combine into a unity and take the ego as their object cannot as yet be sharply differentiated we can already surmise that the narcissistic organization is never altogether given up again to a certain extent man remains narcissistic even after he has found outer objects for his libido and the objects upon which he bestows it represent as it were emanations of the libido which remain with his ego and which can be withdrawn into it the state of being in love so remarkable psychologically and the normal prototype of the psychoses corresponds to the highest stage of these emanations in contrast to the state of self-love this high estimation of psychic acts found among primitives and neurotics which we feel to be an overestimation may now appropriately be brought into relation to narcissism and interpreted as an essential part of it we would say that among primitive people thinking is still highly sexualized and that this accounts for the belief in the omnipotence of thought the unshaken confidence in the capacity to dominate the world and the inaccessibility to the obvious facts which could enlighten man as to his real place in the world in the case of neurotics a considerable part of this primitive attitude has remained as a constitutional factor while on the other hand the sexual repression occurring in them has brought about a new sexualization of the processes of thought in both cases whether we deal with an original libidinous investment of thought or whether the same process has been accomplished aggressively the psychic results are the same namely intellectual narcissism and omnipotence of thought if we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among primitive races as a proof of their narcissism we may venture to compare the various evolutionary stages of man's conception to the universe with the stages of the libidinous evolution of the individual we find that the animistic phase corresponds in time as well as in content with narcissism the religious phase corresponds to that stage of object finding which is characterized by dependence on the parents while the scientific stage has its full counterpart in the individual state of maturity we're having renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself to reality he seeks his object in the outer world only in one field has the omnipotence of thought been retained in our own civilization namely in art in art alone it still happens that man consumed by his wishes produces something similar to the gratification of these wishes and this playing thanks to artistic illusion calls forth effects as if it were something real we rightly speak of the magic of art and compare the artist with a magician but this comparison is perhaps more important than it claims to be art which certainly did not begin as art for art's sake originally serve tendencies which today have for the greater parts ceased to exist among these we may suspect various magic intentions section four animism the first conception of the world which man succeeded in evolving was therefore psychological it did not yet require any science to establish it or science sets in only after we have realized that we do not know the world and that we must therefore seek means of getting to know it but animism was natural and self-evident to primitive man he knew how the things of the world were constituted and as man conceived himself to be we are therefore prepared to find that primitive man transferred the structural relations of his own psyche to the outer world and on the other hand we may make the attempt to transfer back into the human soul but animism teaches about the nature of things magic the technique of animism clearly and unmistakably shows the tendency of forcing the laws of psychic life upon the reality of things under conditions where spirits did not yet have to play any role and could still be taken as objects of magic treatment the assumptions of magic are therefore of older origin than the spirit theory which forms the nucleus of animism our psychoanalytic view here coincides with a theory of our our merit according to which animism is preceded by a pre-animistic stage the nature of which is best indicated by the name animatism the theory of general animation we have practically no further knowledge of pre-animism as no race has yet been found without conceptions of spirits while magic still retains the full omnipotence of ideas animism has ceded part of this omnipotence to spirits and thus has started on the way to form of religion now what could have moved primitive man to this first act of renunciation it could hardly have been an insight into the incorrectness of his assumptions for he continued to retain the magic technique as pointed out elsewhere spirits and demons were nothing but the projection of primitive man's emotional impulses he personified the things he endowed with affects populated the world with them and then rediscovered his inner psychic processes outside himself quite like the ingenious paranoic shrieber who found the fixations and detachments of his libido reflected in the fates of the god rays which he invented as on a former occasion we want to avoid the problem as to the origin of the tendency to project psychic processes into the outer world it is fair to assume however that this tendency becomes stronger where the projection into the outer world offers psychic relief such a state of affairs can with certainty be expected if the impulses struggling for omnipotence have come into conflict with each other for then they evidently cannot all become omnipotent the morbid process in paranoia actually uses the mechanism of projection to solve such conflicts which arise in the psychic life however it so happens that the model case of such a conflict between two parts of an antithesis is the ambivalent attitude which we have analyzed in detail in the situation of the mourner at the death of one dear to him such a case appeals to us is especially fitted to motivate the creation of projection formations here again we are in agreement with those authors who declare that evil spirits were the first born among spirits and who find the origin of soul conceptions in the impression which death makes upon the survivors we differ from them only in not putting the intellectual problem which death imposes upon the living into the foreground instead of which we transfer the force which stimulates inquiry to the conflict of feelings into which this situation plunges the survivor the first theoretical accomplishment of man the creation of spirits would therefore spring from the same source as the first immoral restrictions to which he subjects himself namely the rules of taboo but the fact that they have the same source should not prejudice us in favor of a simultaneous origin if it really were the situation of the survivor confronted by the death which first caused primitive man to reflect so that he was compelled to surrender some of his omnipotence to spirits and to sacrifice a part of the free will of his actions these cultural creations would be a first recognition of the anarchy which opposes man's narcissism primitive man would bow to the superior power of death with the same gesture with which he seems to deny it if we have the courage to follow our assumptions further we may ask what essential part of our psychological structure is reflected and reviewed in the projection formation of souls and spirits it is then difficult to dispute that the primitive conception of the soul though still far removed from the later and holy immaterial soul nevertheless shares its nature and therefore looks upon a person or thing as a duality over the two elements of which the known properties and changes of the whole are distributed this origin duality we have borrowed the term from Herbert Spencer is already identical with the dualism which manifests itself in our customary separation of spirit from body and whose indestructible linguistic manifestations we recognize for instance in the description of a person who faints or raves as one who is beside himself the thing which we just like primitive man project into outer reality can hardly be anything else than the recognition of a state in which a given thing is present to the senses and to consciousness next to which another state exists in which the thing is latent but can reappear that is to say the coexistence of perception and memory or to generalize it the existence of unconscious psychic processes next to conscious ones it might be said that in the last analysis the spirit of a person or a thing is the faculty of remembering and representing the object after he or it was withdrawn from conscious perception of course we must not expect from either the primitive or the current conception of the soul that its line of demarcation from other parts should be as marked as that which contemporary science draws between conscious and unconscious psychic activity the animistic soul on the contrary unites determinants from both sides its flightiness and mobility its faculty of leaving the body of permanently or temporarily taking possession of another body all these are characteristics which remind us unmistakably of the nature of consciousness but the way in which it keeps itself concealed behind the personal appearance reminds us of the unconscious today we no longer ascribe its unchangeableness and indestructibility to conscious but to unconscious processes and look upon these as the real bearers of psychic activity we said before that animism is a system of thought the first complete theory of the world we now want to draw certain inferences through psychoanalytic interpretation of such a system our everyday experience is capable of constantly showing us the main characteristics of the system we dream during the night and have learned to interpret the dream in the daytime the dream can without being untrue to its nature appear confused and incoherent but on the other hand it can also imitate the order of impressions of an experience infer one occurrence from another and refer one part of its content to another the dream succeeds more or less in this but hardly ever succeeds so completely than an absurdity or a gap in the structure does not appear somewhere if we subject the dream to interpretation we find that this unstable and irregular order of its components is quite unimportant for our understanding of it the essential part of the dream are the dream thoughts which have to be sure a significant coherent order but their order is quite different from that which we remember from the manifest content of the dream the coherence of the dream thoughts has been abolished and may either remain altogether lost or can be replaced by the new coherence of the dream content besides the condensation of the dream elements there is almost regularly a regrouping of the same which is more or less independent of the former order we say in conclusion that what the dream work has made out of the material of the dream thoughts has been subjected to a new influence the so-called secondary elaboration the object of which evidently is to do away with the incoherence and incomprehensibility caused by the dream work in favor of a new meaning this new meaning which has been brought about by the secondary elaboration is no longer the meaning of the dream thoughts the secondary elaboration of the product of the dream work is an excellent example of the nature and the pretensions of a system an intellectual function in us demands the unification coherence and comprehensibility of everything perceived and thought of and does not hesitate to construct a false connection if as a result of special circumstances it cannot grasp the right one we know such system formations not only from the dream but also from phobias from compulsive thinking and from the types of delusions the system formation is most ingenious in the delusional states paranoia and dominates the clinical picture but it also must not be overlooked in other forms of neuropsychosis in every case we can show that a rearrangement of the psychic material takes place which may often be quite violent provided it seems comprehensible from the point of view of the system the best indication that a system has been formed then lies in the fact that each result of it can be shown to have at least two motivations one of which springs from the assumptions of the system and is therefore eventually delusional and a hidden one which however we must recognize as the real and effective motivation an example from a neurosis may serve as illustration in the chapter on taboo i mentioned a patient whose compulsive prohibitions correspond very neatly to the taboo of the maury the neurosis of this woman was directed against her husband and culminated in the defense against the unconscious wish for his death but her manifest systematic phobia concerned the mention of death in general in which her husband was altogether eliminated and never became the object of conscious solicitude one day she heard her husband give an order to have his dull razors taken to a certain shop to have them sharpened impelled by a peculiar unrest she went to the shop herself and on her return from this reconnoiter she asked her husband to lay the razors aside for good because she had discovered that there was a warehouse of coffins and funeral accessories next to the shop he mentioned she claimed that he had intentionally brought the razors into permanent relation with the idea of death this was then the systematic motivation of the prohibition but we may be sure that the patient would have brought home the prohibition relating to the razors even if she had not discovered this warehouse in the neighborhood for it would have been sufficient if on her way to the shop she had met a hearse a person in mourning or somebody carrying a wreath the net of determinants was spread out far enough to catch the prey in any case it was simply a question whether she should pull it in or not it could be established with certainty that she did not mobilize the determinants of the prohibition in other circumstances she would then have said that it had been one of her better days the real reason for the prohibition of the razor was of course as we can easily guess her resistance against a pleasurably accentuated idea that her husband might cut his throat with the sharpened razors in much the same way a motor inhibition an abasia or an agoraphobia becomes perfected and detailed if the symptom once succeeds in representing an unconscious wish and of imposing a defense against it all the patients remaining unconscious fantasies and effective reminiscences strive for symptomatic expression through this outlet when once it has been opened and range themselves appropriately in the new order within the sphere of the disturbance of gait it would therefore be a futile and really foolish way to begin to try to understand the symptomatic structure and the details of let us say an agoraphobia in terms of its basic assumptions for the whole logic and strictness of connection is only apparent sharper observation can reveal as in the formation of the facade in the dream the greatest inconsistency and arbitrariness in the symptom formation the details of such a systematic phobia take their real motivation from concealed determinants which must have nothing to do with the inhibition in gait it is for this reason that the form of such a phobia varies so and is so contradictory in different people if we now attempt to retrace the system of animism with which we are concerned we may conclude from our insight into other psychological systems that superstition need not be the only and actual motivation of such a single rule or custom even among primitive races and that we are not relieved of the obligation of seeking for concealed motives under the dominance of an animistic system it is absolutely essential that each rule and activity should receive a systematic motivation which we today call superstitious but superstition like anxiety dreams and demons is one of the preliminaries of psychology which have been dissipated by psychoanalytic investigation if we get behind these structures which like a screen conceal understanding we realize that the psychic life and the cultural level of savages have hitherto been inadequately appreciated if we regard the repression of impulses as a measure of the level of culture attained we must admit that under the animistic system to progress and evolution have taken place which unjustly have been underestimated on account of their superstitious motivation if we hear that the warriors of a savage tribe impose the greatest chastity and cleanliness upon themselves as soon as they go upon the war path the obvious explanation is that they dispose of their refuse in order that the enemy may not come into possession of this part of their person in order to harm them by magical means and we may surmise analogous superstitious motivations for their abstinence nevertheless the fact remains that the impulse is renounced and we probably understand the case better if we assume that the savage warrior imposes such restrictions upon himself in compensation because he is on the point of allowing himself the full satisfaction of rural and hostile impulses otherwise forbidden the same holds good for the numerous cases of sexual restriction while he is preoccupied with difficult or responsible tasks even if the basis of these prohibitions can be referred to some association with magic the fundamental conception of gaining greater strength by foregoing gratification of desires nevertheless remains unmistakable and besides the magic rationalization of the prohibition one must not neglect its hygienic route when the men of a savage tribe go away to hunt fish make war or collect valuable plants the women at home are in the meantime subjected to numerous oppressive restrictions which according to the savages themselves exert a sympathetic effect upon the success of the faraway expedition but it does not require much acumen to guess that this element acting at a distance is nothing but a thought of home the longing of the absent and that these disguises conceal the sound psychological insight that the men will do their best only if they are fully assured of the whereabouts of their guarded women on other occasions the thought is directly expressed without magic motivation that the conjugal infidelity of the wife towards the absent husband's efforts the countless taboo rules to which the women of savages are subject during their menstrual periods are motivated by the superstitious dread of blood which in all probability actually determines it but it would be wrong to overlook the possibility that this blood dread also serves aesthetic and hygienic purposes which in every case have to be covered by magic motivations we are probably not mistaken in assuming that such attempted explanations expose us to the reproach of attributing a most improbable delicacy of psychic activities to contemporary savages but i think that we may easily make the same mistake with the psychology of these races who have remained at the animistic stage that we made with the psychic life of the child which we adults understood no better and whose richness and fineness of feeling we have therefore so greatly undervalued i want to consider another group of hitherto unexplained taboo rules because they admit of an explanation with which the psychoanalyst is familiar under certain conditions it is forbidden to many savage races to keep in the house sharp weapons and instruments for cutting frazer cites a german superstition that a knife must not be left lying with the edge pointing upward because god and the angels might injure themselves with it may we not recognize in this taboo a premonition of certain symptomatic actions for which the sharp weapon might be used by unconscious evil impulses end of chapter three read by mary schneider part one of chapter four of totem and taboo by sigman freud this liber vox recording is in the public domain chapter four the infantile recurrence of totemism part one the reader need not fear that psycho analysis which first revealed the regular over determination of psychic acts and formations will be tempted to derive anything so complicated as religion from a single source if it necessarily seeks as in duty bound to gain recognition for one of the sources of this institution it by no means claims exclusiveness for this source or even first rank among the concurring factors only a synthesis from various fields of research can decide what relative importance in the genesis of religion is to be assigned to the mechanism which we are to discuss but such a task exceeds the means as well as the intentions of the psychoanalyst section one the first chapter of this book made us acquainted with the conception of totemism we heard that totemism is a system which takes the place of religion among certain primitive races in australia america and africa and furnishes the basis of social organization we know that in 1869 the scotchman mclennan attracted general interest to the phenomena of totemism which until then had been considered merely as curiosities by his conjecture that a large number of customs and usages in various old as well as modern societies were to be taken as remnants of a totemic epoch science has since then fully recognized the significance of totemism i quote a passage from the elements of the psychology of races by w want 1912 as the latest utterance in this question quote taking all this together it becomes highly probable that a totemic culture was at one time the preliminary stage of every later evolution as well as a transition stage between the state of primitive man and the age of gods and heroes end quote it is necessary for the purposes of this chapter to go more deeply into the nature of totemism for reasons that will be evident later i here give preference to an outline by s reineck who in the year 1900 sketch the following code to totemism in 12 articles like a catechism of the totemic religion one certain animals must not be killed or eaten but men bring up individual animals of these species and take care of them two an animal that dies accidentally is mourned and buried with the same honors as a member of the tribe three the prohibition as to eating sometimes refers only to a certain part of the animal four if pressure of necessity compels the killing of an animal usually spared it is done with excuses to the animal and the attempt is made to mitigate the violation of the taboo namely the killing through various tricks and evasions five if the animal is sacrificed by ritual it is solemnly mourned six at specified solemn occasions like religious ceremonies the skins of certain animals are dawned where totemism still exists these are totem animals seven tribes and individuals assume the names of totem animals eight many tribes use pictures of animals as coats of arms and decorate their weapons with them the men paint animal pictures on their bodies or have them tattooed nine if the totem is one of the feared and dangerous animals it is assumed that the animal will spare the members of the tribe named after it ten the totem animal protects and warns the members of the tribe 11 the totem animal foretells the future to those faithful to it and serves as their leader 12 the members of a totem tribe often believe that they are connected with the totem animal by the bond of common origin the value of this catechism of the totem religion can be more appreciated if one bears in mind that reineck has here also incorporated all the signs and clues which lead to the conclusion that the totemic system had once existed the peculiar attitude of this author to the problem is shown by the fact that to some extent he neglects the essential traits of totemism and we shall see that of the two main tenets of the totemistic catechism he has forced one into the background and completely lost sight of the other in order to get a more correct picture of the characteristics of totemism we turn to an author who has devoted four volumes to the theme combining the most complete collection of the observations in question with the most thorough discussion of the problems they raise we shall remain indebted to jg Fraser the author of totemism and exogamy for the pleasure and information he affords even though psychoanalytic investigation may lead us to results which differ widely from his footnote but it may be well to show the reader beforehand how difficult it is to establish the facts in this field in the first place those who collect the observations are not identical with those who digest and discuss them the first are travelers and missionaries while the others are scientific men who perhaps have never seen the object of their research it is not easy to establish an understanding with savages not all the observers were familiar with the languages but had to use the assistance of interpreters or else had to communicate with the people they questioned in the auxiliary language of pigeon english savages are not communicative about the most intimate affairs of their culture and unburden themselves only to those foreigners who have passed many years in their midst from various motives they often give wrong or misleading information compare Fraser the beginnings of religion and totemism among the australian aborigines fortnightly review 1905 totemism and exogamy volume one page 150 it must not be forgotten that primitive races are not young races but really are as old as the most civilized and that we have no right to expect that they have preserved their original ideas and institutions for our information without any evolution or distortion it is certain on the contrary that far reaching changes in all directions have taken place among primitive races so that we can never unhesitatingly decide which of their present conditions and opinions have preserved the original past having remained petrified as it were and which represent a distortion and change of the original it is due to this that one meets the many disputes among authors as to what proportion of the peculiarities of a primitive culture is to be taken as primary and what as a later and secondary manifestation to establish the original conditions therefore always remains a matter of construction finally it is not easy to adapt oneself to the ways of thinking of primitive races for like children we easily misunderstand them and are always inclined to interpret their acts and feelings according to our own psychic constellations and footnote a totem wrote phraser in his first essay is a class of material objects which is savage regards with superstitious respect believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation the connection between a person and his totem is mutually beneficent the totem protects the man and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways by not killing it if it be an animal and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant as distinguished from a fetish a totem is never an isolated individual but always a class of objects generally a species of animals were a plants more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects very rarely a class of artificial objects end quote at least these last three kinds of totem can be distinguished one the tribal totem which a whole tribe shares and which is hereditary from generation to generation two the sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine members of a tribe to the exclusion of the opposite sex and three the individual totem which belongs to the individual and does not descend to his successors the last two kinds of totem are of comparatively little importance compared to the tribal totem unless we are mistaken there are recent formations and of little importance as far as the nature of the taboo is concerned the tribal totem or clan totem is the object of veneration of a group of men and women who take their name from the totem and consider themselves consanguine offspring of a common ancestor and two are firmly associated with each other through common obligations towards each other as well as by the belief in their totem totemism is a religious as well as a social system on its religious side it consists of the relations of mutual respect and consideration between a person and his totem and on the social side it is composed of obligations of the members of the clan towards each other and towards other tribes in the later history of totemism these two sides show a tendency to part company the social system often survives the religious and conversely remnants of totemism remain in the religion of countries in which the social system based upon totemism has disappeared in the present state of our ignorance about the origin of totemism we cannot say with certainty how these two sides were originally combined but there is on the whole a strong probability that in the beginning the two sides of totemism were indistinguishable from each other in other words the further we go back the clearer it becomes that a member of a tribe looks upon himself as being of the same genus as his totem and makes no distinction between his attitude towards the totem and his attitude towards his tribal companions in the special description of totemism as a religious system phraser lay stress on the fact that the members of a tribe assume the name of their totem and also as a rule believe that they are descended from it it is due to this belief that they do not hunt the totem animal or kill or eat it and that they deny themselves every other use of the totem if it is not an animal the prohibitions against killing or eating the totem are not the only taboos affecting it sometimes it is also forbidden to touch it and even to look at it in a number of cases the totem must not be called by its right name violation of the taboo prohibitions which protect the totem is punished automatically by serious disease or death specimens of the totem animals are sometimes raised by the clan and taken care of in captivity a totem animal found dead is mourned and buried like a member of the clan if a totem animal had to be killed it was done with a prescribed ritual of excuses and ceremonies of expiation the tribe expected protection and forbearance from its totem if it was a dangerous animal a beast of prey or a poisonous snake it was assumed that it would not harm and where this assumption did not come true the person attacked was expelled from the tribe phraser thinks that oaths were originally or deals many tests as to dissent and genuineness being in this way left to the decision of the totem the totem helps in case of illness and gives the tribe premonitions and warnings the appearance of the totem animal near a house was often looked upon as an announcement of death the totem had come to get its relative a member of a clan seeks to emphasize his relationship to the totem in various significant ways he imitates an exterior similarity by dressing himself in the skin of the totem animal by having the picture of it tattooed upon himself and in other ways on the solemn occasions of birth initiation into manhood or funeral obsequies this identification with the totem is carried out in deeds and words dances in which all the members of the tribe disguise themselves as their totem and act like it serve various magic and religious purposes finally there are the ceremonies at which the totem animal is killed in a solemn manner the social side of totemism is primarily expressed in a sternly observed commandment and in a tremendous restriction the members of a totem clan are brothers and sisters pledged to help and protect each other if a member of the clan is slain by a stranger the whole tribe of the slayer must answer for the murder and the clan of the slain man shows its solidarity and the demand for expiation for the blood that has been shed the ties of the totem are stronger than our ideas of family ties with which they do not altogether coincide since the transfer of the totem takes place as a rule through maternal inheritance paternal inheritance possibly not counting at all in the beginning but the corresponding taboo restriction consists in the prohibition against members of the same clan marrying each other or having any kind of sexual intercourse whatsoever with each other this is the famous and enigmatic exogamy connection with totemism we have devoted the whole first chapter of this book to it and therefore need only mention here that this exogamy springs from the intensified incest dread of primitive races that it becomes entirely comprehensible as a security against incest in group marriages and that at first it accomplishes the avoidance of incest for the younger generation and only in the course of further development becomes a hindrance to the older generation as well to this presentation of totemism by phraser one of the earliest in the literature on the subject i will now add a few excerpts from one of the latest summaries in the elements of the psychology of races which appeared in 1912 w won't says quote the totem animal is considered the ancestral animal totem is therefore both a group name and a birth name and in the latter aspect this name has at the same time a mythological meaning but all these uses of the conception play into each other and the particular meanings may recede so that in some cases the totems have become almost a mere nomenclature of the tribal divisions while in others the idea of the descent or else the cultic meaning of the totem remains in the foreground the conception of the totem determines the tribal arrangement and the tribal organization these norms and their establishment in the belief and feelings of the members of the tribe account for the fact that originally the totem animal was certainly not considered merely a name for a group division but that it usually was considered the progenitor of the corresponding division this accounted for the fact that these animal ancestors enjoyed a cult this animal cult expresses itself primarily in the attitude towards the totem animal quite aside from the special ceremonies and ceremonial festivities not only each individual animal but every representative of the same species was to a certain degree a sanctified animal the member of the totem was forbidden to eat the flesh of the totem animal or he was allowed to eat it only under special circumstances this is in accord with a significant contradictory phenomenon found in this connection namely that under certain conditions there was a kind of ceremonial conception of the totem flesh but the most important social side of this totemic tribal arrangement consists in the fact that it was connected with certain rules of conduct for the relations of the groups with each other the most important of these were the rules of conjugal relations this tribal division is thus connected with an important phenomenon which first made its appearance in the totemic age namely with exogamy end quote if we wish to arrive at the characteristics of the original totemism by sifting through everything that may correspond to later development or decline we find the following essential facts the totems were originally only animals and were considered the ancestors of single tribes the totem was hereditary only through the female line it was forbidden to kill the totem or to eat it which under primitive conditions amounts to the same thing members of a totem were forbidden to have sexual intercourse with each other it may now seem strange to us that in the code de totemisme which reineck has drawn up the one principal taboo namely exogamy does not appear at all while the assumption of the second taboo namely the descent from the totem animal is only casually mentioned yet reineck is an author to whose work in this field we owe much and i have chosen his representation in order to prepare us for the differences of opinion among the authors which will now occupy our attention section two the more convinced we became that totemism had regularly formed a phase of every culture the more urgent became the necessity of arriving at an understanding of it and have casting light upon the riddle of its nature to be sure everything about totemism is in the nature of a riddle the decisive questions are the origin of the totem the motivation of exogamy or rather of the incest taboo which it represents and the relation between the two the totem organization and the incest prohibition the understanding should be at once historical and psychological it should inform us under what conditions this peculiar institution developed and do what psychic needs of man it has given expression the reader will certainly be astonished to hear from how many different points of view the answer to these questions has been attempted and how far the opinions of expert investigators vary almost everything that might be asserted in general about totemism is doubtful even the above statement of it taken from an article by Fraser in 1887 cannot escape the criticism that expresses an arbitrary preference of the author and would be challenged today by Fraser himself who has repeatedly changed his view on the subject it is quite obvious that the nature of totemism and exogamy could be most easily grasped if we could get into closer touch with the origin of both institutions but in judging the state of affairs we must not forget the remark of Andrew Lang that even primitive races have not preserved these original forms and the conditions of their origin so that we are all together dependent upon hypotheses to take the place of the observation we lack among the attempted explanations some seem inadequate from the very beginning in the judgment of the psychologist they are all together too rational and do not take into consideration the effective character of what they are to explain others rest on assumptions which observation fails to verify while still others appeal to facts which could better be subjected to another interpretation the refutation of these various opinions as a rule hardly presents any difficulties the authors are as usual stronger in criticism which they practice on each other than in their own work the final result as regards most of the points treated is a non-liquette it is therefore not surprising that most of the new literature on the subject which we have largely omitted here shows the unmistakable effort to reject a general solution of totemic problems as unfeasible see for instance be golden wiser in the journal of american folklore twenty three nineteen ten reviewed in the britannica yearbook nineteen thirteen i have taken the liberty of disregarding the chronological order in stating these contradictory hypotheses a the origin of totemism the question of the origin of totemism can also be formulated as follows how did primitive people come to select the names of animals plants and inanimate objects for themselves and their tribes the scotchman mclenan who discovered totemism and exogamy for science refrain from publishing his views of the origin of totemism according to a communication of andrew lang he was for a time inclined to trace totemism back to the custom of tattooing i shall divide the accepted theories of the derivation of totemism into three groups alpha nominalistic beta sociological and gamma psychological alpha the nominalistic theories the information about these theories will justify their summation under the headings i have used garcilaso de la vega a descendant of the peruvian incas who wrote the history of his race in the 17th century is already said to have traced back what was known to him about totemic phenomena to the need of the tribes to differentiate themselves from each other by means of names the same idea appears centuries later in the ethnology of a k keen where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges through which individuals families and tribes wanted to differentiate themselves max muhler expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem in his contributions to the science of mythology a totem is said to be one a mark of the clan to a clan name three the name of the ancestor of the clan for the name of the object which the clan reveres jay pickler wrote later in 1899 that men needed a permanent name for communities and individuals that could be preserved in writing thus totemism arises not from a religious but from a prosaic everyday need of mankind the giving of names which is the essence of totemism is a result of the technique of primitive writing the totem is of the nature of an easily represented writing symbol but if savages first bore the name of an animal they deduce the idea of relationship from this animal herbert spencer also thought that the origin of totemism was to be found in the giving of names the attributes of certain individuals he showed had brought about their being named after animals so that they had come to have names of honor or nicknames which continued in their descendants as a result of the indefiniteness and incomprehensibility of primitive languages these names are said to have been taken by later generations as proof of their descent from the animals themselves totemism would thus be the result of a mistaken reverence for ancestors lord avabary better known under his former name sir john Lubbock has expressed himself quite similarly about the origin of totemism though without emphasizing the misunderstanding if we want to explain the veneration of animals we must not forget how often human names are borrowed from animals the children and followers of a man who was called bear or lion naturally made this their ancestral name in this way it came about that the animal itself came to be respected and finally venerated fison has advanced what seems an irrefutable objection to such a derivation of the totem name from the names of individuals he shows from conditions in australia that the totem is always the mark of a group of people and never of an individual but if it were otherwise if the totem was originally the name of a single individual it could never with the system of maternal inheritance descend to his children the theories thus far stated are evidently inadequate they may explain how animal names came to be applied to primitive tribes but they can never explain the importance attached to the giving of names which constitutes the totemic system the most noteworthy theory of this group has been developed by andrew lang and his books social origins 1903 and the secret of the totem 1905 this theory still makes naming the center of the problem but it uses two interesting psychological factors and thus may claim to have contributed to the final solution of the riddle of totemism andrew lang holds that it does not make any difference how clans acquire their animal names it might be assumed that one day they woke to the consciousness that they had them without being able to account from where they came the origin of these names had been forgotten in that case they would seek to acquire more information by pondering over their names and with their conviction of the importance of names they necessarily came to all the ideas that are contained in the totemic system for primitive men as for savages of today and even for our children a name is not indifferent and conventional as it seems to us but is something important and essential a man's name is one of the main constituents of his person and perhaps a part of his psyche the fact that they had the same names as animals must have led primitive men to assume a secret and important bond between their persons and the particular animal species what other bond than consanguinity could it be but if the similarity of names once led to this assumption it could also account directly for the totemic prohibitions of the blood taboo including exogamy quote no more than these three things a group animal name of unknown origin belief in a transcendental connection between all bearers human and bestial of the same name and belief in the blood superstitions were needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy end quote secret of the totem page 126 lang's explanation extends over two periods it derives the totemic system of psychological necessity from the totem names on the assumption that the origin of the naming has been forgotten the other part of the theory now seeks to clear up the origin of these names we shall see that it bears an entirely different stamp this other part of the lang theory is not markedly different from those which i have called nominalistic the practical need of differentiation compelled the individual tribes to assume names and therefore they tolerated the names which every tribe ascribed to the other this naming from without is the peculiarity of lang's construction the fact that the names which thus originated were borrowed from animals is not further remarkable and need not have been felt by primitive men as abuse or derision besides lang has cited numerous cases from later epochs of history in which names given from without that were first meant to be derisive were accepted by those nicknamed and voluntarily born the geese's wigs and tories the assumption that the origin of these names was forgotten in the course of time connects the second part of the lang theory with the first one just mentioned beta the sociological theories s reineck who successfully traced the relics of the totemic system in the cult and customs of later periods though attaching from the very beginning only slight value to the factor of descent from the totem animal once made the casual remark that totemism seemed to him to be nothing but an hypertrophy de l'instinct social the same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of e durkheim la forme alimentaire de la vie religieuse the system totemic on australie 1912 the totem is the visible representative of the social religion of these races it embodies the community which is the real object of veneration other authors have sought a more intimate reason for the share which social impulses have played in the formation of totemic institutions thus ac haden has assumed that every primitive tribe originally lived on a particular plant or animal species and perhaps also traded with this food and exchanged it with other tribes it then was inevitable that a tribe should become known to other tribes by the name of the animal which played such weighty role with it at the same time this tribe would develop a special familiarity with this animal and a kind of interest for it which however was based upon the psychic motive of man's most elementary and pressing need namely hunger the objections against this most rational of all the totem theories are that such a state of the food supply is never found among primitive men and probably never existed savages are the more omnivorous the lower they stand in the social scale besides it is incomprehensible how such an exclusive diet could have developed an almost religious relation to the totem culminating in an absolute abstention from the preferred food the first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which phraser stated was a psychological one we shall report it elsewhere phraser second theory which we will discuss here originated under the influence of an important publication by two investigators of the inhabitants of central australia spencer and gillen describe a series of peculiar institutions customs and opinions of a group of tribes the so-called arunta nation and phraser subscribes to their opinion that these peculiarities are to be looked upon as characteristics of a primary state and that they can explain the first and real meaning of totemism in the arunta tribe itself a part of the arunta nation these peculiarities are as follows one they had the division into totem clans but the totem is not hereditary but is individually determined as will be shown later two the totem clans are not exogamous and the marriage restrictions are brought about by a highly developed division into marriage classes which have nothing to do with the totems three the function of the totem clan consists of carrying out a ceremony which in a subtle magic manner brings about an increase of the edible totem this ceremony is called intichiguma for the aruntas have a peculiar theory about conception and rebirth they assume that the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem wait for their rebirth in definite localities and 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 reborn are bound to peculiar stone amulets called churinga which are found in these places two factors seem to have induced Fraser 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 the 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 today Fraser in having recourse to the intichioma 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 hadn't above the system was simply an extraordinary piece of cooperative magic primitive men formed what might be called a magic production and consumption club each totem clan undertook to see to the cleanliness of a certain article of food if it were a question of inedible totems like harmful animals rain wind or similar objects it was the duty of the totem clan to dominate this part of nature and to ward off its injuriousness the efforts of each clan were for the good of all the others as the clan could not eat its totem or could eat only a very little of it it furnished this valuable product for the rest and was in turn furnished with what these had to take care of as their social totem duty in the light of this interpretation furnished by the intichioma ceremony it appeared to Fraser as if the prohibition against eating the totem had misled observers to neglect the more important side of the relation namely the commandment to supply as much as possible of the edible totem for the needs of others Fraser accepted the tradition of the aruntas that each totem clan had originally lived on its totem without any restriction it then became difficult to understand the evolution that followed through which savages were satisfied to ensure the totem for others while they themselves abstain from eating it he then assumed that this restriction was by no means the result of a kind of religious respect but came about through the observation that no animal devoured its own kind so that this break in the identification with the totem was injurious to the power which savages sought to acquire over the totem or else it resulted from the endeavor to make it being favorably disposed by sparing it Fraser did not conceal the difficulties of this explanation from himself nor did he dare to indicate in what way the habit of marrying within the totem which the myths of the aruntas proclaimed was converted into exogamy Fraser's theory based on the Intichiuma stands and falls with the recognition of the primitive nature of the arunta institutions but it seems impossible to hold to this in the fact of the objections advanced by Durkheim and Lang the aruntas seem on the contrary to be the most developed of the Australian tribes and to represent rather a dissolution stage of totemism than its beginning the myths that made such an impression on Fraser because they emphasize in contrast to prevailing institutions of today that the aruntas are free to eat the totem and to marry within it easily explain themselves to us as wish fantasies which are projected into the past like the myths of the golden age gamma the psychological theories Fraser's first psychological theories formed before his acquaintance with the observations of Spencer and Gillon were based upon the belief in an outward soul the totem was meant to represent a safe place of refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers which threaten it after primitive man had housed his soul in his totem he himself became invulnerable and he naturally took care himself not to harm the bearer of his soul but as he did not know which individual of the species in question was the bearer of his soul he was concerned in sparing the whole species Fraser himself later gave up this derivation of totemism from the belief in souls when he became acquainted with the observations of Spencer and Gillon he set up the other social theory which has just been stated but he himself then saw that the motive from which he had derived totemism was altogether too rational and that he had assumed a social organization for it which was altogether too complicated to be called primitive the magic cooperative companies now appeared to him rather as the fruit than as the germ of totemism he sought a simpler factor for the derivation of totemism in the shape of a primitive superstition behind these forms he then found this original factor in the remarkable conception theory of the Aruntas as already stated the Aruntas established no connection between conception and the sexual act if a woman feels herself to be a mother it means that at that moment one of the spirits from the nearest spirit abode who has been watching for a rebirth has penetrated into her body and is born as her child this child has the same totem as all the spirits that lurk in that particular locality but if we are willing to go back a step further and assume that the woman originally believed that the animal plant stone or other object which occupied her fancy at the moment when she first felt herself pregnant had really penetrated into her and was being born through her in human form then the identity of a human being with his totem would really be founded on the belief of the mother and all the other totem commandments with the exception of exogamy could easily be derived from this belief men would refuse to eat the particular animal or plant because it would be just like eating themselves but occasionally they would be impelled to eat some of their totem in a ceremonial manner because they could thus strengthen their identification with the totem which is the essential part of totemism. WHR rivers observations among the inhabitants of the bank islands seem to prove men's direct identification with their totems on the basis of such a conception theory the ultimate sources of totemism would then be the ignorance of savages as to the process of procreation among human beings and animals especially their ignorance as to the role which the male plays in fertilization this ignorance must be facilitated by the long interval which is interposed between the fertilizing act and the birth of the child or the sensation of the child's first movements totemism is therefore a creation of the feminine mind and not of the masculine the sick fancies of the pregnant woman are the roots of it anything indeed that struck a woman at that mysterious moment of her life when she first knows herself to be a mother might easily be identified by her with the child in her womb such maternal fancy so natural and seemingly so universal appeared to be the root of totemism the main objection to this third theory of phrasers is the same which has already been advanced against his second sociological theory the runt has seemed to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism their denial of fatherhood does not apparently rest upon primitive ignorance in many cases they even have paternal inheritance they seem to have sacrificed fatherhood to a kind of a speculation which strives to honor the ancestral spirits though they raised the myth of immaculate conception through a spirit to a general theory of conception we cannot for that reason credit them with ignorance as to the conditions of procreation any more than we could the old races who lived during the rise of the christian myths another psychological theory of the origin of totemism has been formulated by the dutch writer ga wilken it establishes a connection between totemism and the migration of souls quote the animal into which according to general belief the souls of the dead past became a blood relative an ancestor and was revered as such end quote but the belief in the souls migration to animals is more readily derived from totemism than inversely still another theory of totemism is advanced by the excellent american ethnologists franz boas hill tout and others it is based on observations of totemic indian tribes and asserts that the totem is originally the guardian spirit of an ancestor who has acquired it through a dream and handed it on to his descendants we have already heard the difficulties which the derivation of totemism through inheritance from a single individual offers besides the australian observations seem by no means to support the tracing back of the totem to the guardian spirit two facts have become decisive for the last of the psychological theories as stated by wont in the first place that the origin and most widely known totem object was an animal and secondly that the earliest totem animals correspond to animals which had a soul such animals as birds snakes lizards mice are fitted by their extreme mobility their flight through the air and by other characteristics which arouse surprise and fear to become the bears of souls which leave their bodies the totem animal is a descendant of the animal transformations of the spirit soul thus with want totemism is directly connected with the belief in souls or with animism and part one of chapter four read by mary schneider