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

v] Totemistic Thinking based on Group-unity 125
various stages of development. They then shuffle out one by one
with a gliding motion to indicate the emergence of the insect 1
.
They enact, they represent their own union and communion, their
identity with their totem, and thereby somehow intensify its life
and productiveness. At the back of the whole grotesque perform-
ance lies, not so much a mistaken ratiocination, but an intense
desire for food, issuing in a vivid representation.
Totemism and totemistic ceremonies and ways of thinking are
based, we have seen, on group-emotion, on a sense of solidarity, of
oneness. No distinction is felt between the human and nonhuman
members of the totem-group, or rather, to be more exact,
the beginning of a distinction is just dawning. The magical
ceremonies, the shedding of the human blood, the counterfeiting
of the animal, have for their object to bridge the gulf that is just
opening, to restore by communion that complete unity which is
just becoming conscious of possible division. The ceremonies are
however still intensely sympathetic and cooperative ; they are, as
the Greeks would say, rather methektic than mimetic, the expres-
sion, the utterance, of a common nature participated in, rather
than the imitation of alien characteristics. The Emu man still
feels he is an Emu ; the feathers he puts on, the gait he emulates,
are his own, not another's.
But, strong though the sense of group-unity is in Totemism,
the rift has begun. Totemism means not only unity of one group,
but also disparity from other groups. The Emu men are one
among themselves, and one with the Emu birds, but they are
alien to the Witchetty Grub men, and have no power to multiply
Witchetty Grubs—or Kangaroos. Behind the totemistic system
may lie a pre-totemistic social state 2 , when the tribe was all one, not
yet broken into totemistic groups. The cause of the severance we
can only conjecture. Probably it was due to the merely mechanical
cause of pressure of population. The tribe growing over-populous
loses coherence and falls asunder by simple segmentation. Once
that segmentation occurs each half gathers round a nucleus.
1 Frazer, op. cit. i. p. 106, of how food comes to be.
2 I am indebted for this idea to views expressed by Mr A. R. Brown in a course
of lectures delivered in 1909 at Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr Brown suggested
that the Andaman Islanders and the Esquimaux were perhaps instances of pretotemistic
peoples.