Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

v] Psychology of Totemism 121
expressed in terms of actual identity 1
. A
Central Australian
pointing to a photograph of himself will say, ' That one is just the
same as me,' so is a kangaroo (his totem). We say the Central
Australian ' belongs to the kangaroo tribe ' ; he knows better, he is
kangaroo. Now it is this persistent affirmation of primitive man
in the totemistic stage that he is an animal or a plant, that he is
a kangaroo or an opossum or a witchetty grub or a plum tree,
that instantly arrests our attention, and that has in fact obscured
the other and main factor in totemism, the unity of the human
group. The human group we understand and realize to a certain
extent. Man, we know, is gregarious, he thinks and feels as a
group. So much our latter-day parochialism or patriotism or
socialism may help us to imagine. It is the extension of the
group to include those strange tribesmen, plants, animals and
stones, that staggers us 2 . 'What,' we ask, 'does the savage mean by
being one, identical with them ? Why does he persistently affirm
and reaffirm that he is a bear, an opossum, a witchetty grub, when
he quite well knows that he is not ?
Because to know is one thing, to feel is another. Because to
know is first and foremost to distinguish, to note differences, to
discern qualities, and thereby to classify. Above all things it is
to realize the distinction between me and not-me. We all
remember Tennyson's ' Baby new to earth and sky.' He and
the savage have never clearly said that ' this is I.' Man in the
totemistic stage rarely sets himself as individual over against his
tribe ;
'
he rarely sets himself as man over against the world around .
him 3 . He has not yet fully captured his individual or his
human soul, not yet drawn a circle round his separate self.
It is not that he confuses between himself and a kangaroo
it is that he has not yet drawn the clear-cut outline that
defines the conception kangaroo from that of man and eternally
separates them. His mental life is as yet mainly emotional, one
of felt relations.
1 See L6vy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societes Inferieures, 1910,
p. 25.
2 But not if we become 'as little children.' Mr S. Keinach in his delightful
Orpheus says of totemism (p. 22), 'Ce respect de la vie d'un animal, d'un vegetal,
n'est autre chose qu'une exageration, une hypertrophic de l'instinct social. II suffit
de mener un jeune enfant dans un jardin zoologiqne pour s'assurer que cette
hypertrophic est tres naturelle a l'homme.'
3 For an illuminating account of the psychology of this process see the chapter
on ' Wahrnehmung ' (Perception) in Dr P. Beck's Die Nachahmung, 1904.
;