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

v] Gradual Segregation of God and Worshipper 127
after that faith in unity, in consubstantiality, which is of its essence,
is dying or even dead. The stages of its death are gradual. The
whole group ceases to carry on the magical rite, which becomes
the province of a class of medicine-men ;
the specialized Kouretes,
as we have seen, supplant the whole body of Kouroi. Finally the
power is lodged in an individual, a head medicine-man, a king
whose functions are at first rather magical than political.
As the wielder of the power becomes specialized and indi-
vidualized, his power becomes generalized. In primitive totemistic
conditions the Emu man, by virtue of his common life, his common
mana, controlled, or rather sympathetically invigorated, Emus
but his power was limited to Emus. Once the totemistic system
begins to break down, this rigid departmentalism cannot be kept
up. The band of magicians, and later the individual medicineman
or medicine-king began to claim control over the food
supply and over fertility in general, and also over the weather, on
which, bit by bit, it is seen that the food supply depends. The
medicine-king tends towards, though he never attains, complete
omnipotence.
One other point remains to be observed.
' It is a serious though apparently a common mistake,' says Dr Frazer 1
,
'to speak of a totem as a god and say that it is worshipped by the clan. In
pure totemism, such as we tind it among the Australian aborigines, the totem
is never a god, and is never worshipped. A man no more worships his totem
and regards it as his god than he worships his father and mother, his brother
and his sister, and regards them as gods.'
The reason why pure totemism cannot be a system of worship
is now abundantly clear. Worship involves conscious segregation
of god and worshipper. The very idea of a god, as we have seen
in the case of the Kouros and the Bacchos, belongs to a later stage
of epistemology, a stage in which a man stands off from his own
imagination, looks at it, takes an attitude towards it, sees it as
object. Worship connotes an object of worship. Between totemism
and worship stands the midway stage of magic. Magic in its
more elementary forms we have already seen in considering the
Thunder-Rites. Two later developments have now to be examined,
developments closely analogous, Sacramental Communion and
Sacrifice.
1 Totemism and Exogamy, 1910, vol. iv. p. 5.
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