RELIGION AND PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

I. THH RELIGION OF THE HUNTER.

DtmiNG the last seventy years the study of primitive religion has
made enormous progress. From a euhemeristic theorising on the
mythology of the civilised peoples of antiquity we have passed to the
scientific study of the beliefs and religious practices of all the existing
primitive peoples of the earth, and in the light of the new anthropo-
logical method our knowledge of ancient society and religion has been
reconstituted, and it has even been possible in some measure to recreate
the psychic life of primitive and prehistoric society.
AND the new knowledge is far from lessening the historic importance
of religion, or from circumscribing its zone of influence in space or
time. The deeper we delve, the more evident it is how inseparable
is the religious instinct from human life and society. The beginnings
of religion are as old as the human consciousness, and we can no more
go behind the religious stage in human history than we can go behind
the origins of language or of social life itself.
THIS, however, presupposes a broader definition of Religion, than
that which it has sometimes received. It cannot be said if, with Sir
James Frazer, we limit Religion to the conciliation and worship of
supernatural and personal beings which control the forces of nature.
Even Tyler's " minimum" definition " the belief in spiritual Beings "
is too narrow, for primitive religion is something vaguer and more
rudimentary even than the type of thought to which these definitions
properly refer. Yet we can go back behind this stage and still find
Religion—a powerful and living Religion—existing. Wherever and
whenever man has a sense of dependence on external powers which
are conceived as mysterious and higher than man's own, there is
Religion, and the feelings of awe and self-abasement with which man
is filled in the presence of such powers is essentially a religious
emotion, the root of worship and prayer.
TAKEN in this sense the religious instinct is part of the nature of man,
the eternal child, who retains through life the child's sense of weakness
and impotence, and the child's trust and clinging to a strength that
is greater than his own. It involves both affection and fear, and its
power is strongest at times of individual or social crisis, when the
routine of ordinary life is broken through and men are face to face
with the unforeseen and the unknown. Hence the moments of vital
change in the life of the individual—birth, puberty and death—are
pre-eminently religious, and so, too, for a society that lives in close
dependence on nature, are the vital moments of the life of the earth,
spring and winter, seed-time and harvest, the yearly death and rebirth
of nature.

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AND no less important for religion are the times of intenud stress,
whether individual or social, when men are forced to leave the old
ways to which they are habituated and to launch out on a new course
of thought and action : times such as the Indians of the Plains
experienced, when the bison, by which they lived, were driven off
the prairies,^ or such as the Greeks knew when the City State began
to pass away before the coming of the world empires. But apart
from exceptional crises such as these, man feels the need even in normal
tinres to recur to the help of outside powers and to bring his ordinary
life—^his " secular " or " profane " existence—into contact with and
under the sanctions of that other world of mysterious and " sacred "
potencies, whose action he always conceives as the ultimate and
fundamental law of life.
HENCE throughout the history of the human race the religious impulse
has been always and everywhere present as one of the great permanent
forces that makes and alters man's destiny. It is of course possible
for men to repress and restrain it, but as with other instincts, it is
certain, if thwarted, to find some equivalent or compensatory outlet,
often, as we shall see, with disastrous results for society. It is true
that not all cultures or all periods have given an equal place to religion.
As a rule the greater the element of material security and control
over the natural and social environment, the less striking is the import-
ance of the religious impulse. Thus China is often pointed to as an
example of a great historic culture which is mainly non-religious.
It must be remembered, however, that in China the filial relation is
preserved throughout life, and even after the death of the parent,
with such intensity that it tends to absorb the religious instinct, and
to be in fact the working religion of the Chinaman. And on the other
hand, it is largely this lack of religion, in the wider sense of the word,
during recent centuries, that is responsible for the complete stagnation
of Chinese culture and its failure to deal with new problems and
opportunities, and also for the contrast between the integrity and
efficiency of the Chinaman in his private and individual relations, and
his corruption and inefficiency in politics and public life. However,
the case of China is admittedly exceptional. In the majority of the
higher cultures the action of the religious impulse is just as evident
as it is among the more rudimentary ones, although in consequence
of a development of thousands of years, it has become intellectualized
and introverted—separated from an immediate relation with the
sensible world.
ON the other hand the more primitive is Man, the more directly is
his religious experience related to his external surroimdings. He has
not learnt, like civilised man, to disassociate Appearance and Reality,
* This was the origin of the great wave of religious excitement, known as tbe Ghost
Dance Religion, which resulted in the Sioux war of 1890.

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or to look on the natural world as a passive material system—a back-

ground for man's energies, mere matter for the human mind to mould.
On the contrary, he saw Nature as a living complex of mysterious
forces greater than his own, in the service and placation of which his
whole life consisted. But when we come to the question of how he
conceived these powers and how he adapted his life to them we are
necessarily dependent on our positive knowledge of his general culture
and the specific conditions of his existence. Many attempts—some
of them brilliant enough—have been made to reconstruct the whole
course of man's social and religious development from the very dawn
of humanity, but in the present state of our knowledge these are
incapable of proof or disproof, and we must adnut that the problem
of human origins is still a mystery. It is impossible to reconstruct
man's early social organisation, and still more his psychic develop-
ments from eoliths or even coups-de-poings or from the rare fossil
remains—such as those of Piltdown man—whose very physical inter-
pretation is uncertain. It is only in the middle and later palaeolithic
stages, i.e., in relatively recent times, that the remains are sufficiently
numerous and varied to warrant some deductions as to man's psychic
or religious development. Then at least in several interments of the
Mousterian period, notably at La Chapelle aux Saintes and at La
Ferassie, there is evidence that the disposal of the dead was accom-
panied with practices which point to the belief in some existence in
or beyond the tomb. The very fact that a careful interment is made,
suggests some thought for the welfare of the dead, but far more
important is the presence with the corpse of weapons and implements,
of food offerings, and in one case of a rhinoceros horn which, from
later palaeolithic evidence, seems to have possessed some magical
significance. Moreover, at La Ferassie, the large block of stone which
covered the bones was found on its removal to be covered with artificial
cup-markings such as are found on sacred stones in neolithic and
later times.
HERE, then, in Mousterian times and in association with the Neanderthal
type of man which has no direct connections with its successors, do
we find the first evidence of practices and beliefs that can be called
religious. It is, however, clearly impossible to argue from this
evidence that the origins of religion are to be looked for in the cult
of the dead. Our knowledge of the Mousterian culture is too frag-
mentary for us to form any general ideas about Mousterian religion
and its relation to social life. This only becomes possible in the later
palaeolithic period, when a flood of light is thrown on prehistoric
culture by the art of the Magdalenian cave paintings and the Aurigna-
dan figure sculptures and bone engravings as well as by the human
remains and the objects assodated with interments. From these it
is powible to form a picture of the culture of the later palaeolithic

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inhabitants of Europe—the external conditions of their life and their

mental reaction to their environment—which is capable of being com-
pared in its main features with that of existing peoples of primitive
type, such as the Bushmen of Africa and the Australian aborigines,
and in some respects with even more advanced peoples, such as the
hunting peoples of North America.
IT is, however, a very controversial question whether it is possible
to regard modern " savages " as representative of truly primitive
conditions. For on the one hand it has been held that the most
backward existing peoples (as for example the Australians) are prac-
tically unchanged survivals of prehistoric culture—social fossils from
an extremely remote past which we can use to reconstruct the social
and intellectual life of our prehistoric forerunners in Europe ; while
on the other hand, it is believed by an increasingly numerous school
that the so-called primitive peoples owe the greater part of their
social and religious institutions to the influence of civilising currents
transmitted in earlier times by the ancient historic cultures. Certainly
it is impossible to deny the extremely primitive character of the
Australian and Papuo-Melanesian peoples—or at least of one strain
in them. The skulls found at Wadjak in Java and at Talgai in Queens-
land point to the development of a separate human type in Australasia,
which has some affinities to the Neanderthal type and which appears
to be the direct ancestor of the Australian race. Thus the modem
Australians represent a more " palaeoanthropic " type than anything
to be found elsewhere. It would, therefore, not be surprising that
the more primitive anthropological type preserves a correspondingly
primitive type of culture and religion—perhaps even a lower type than
that already possessed by the large-brained and talented men of the
later palseolithic age in Europe. Yet there are insuperable difficulties
in the way of the view upheld by some writers that Australia is the
original home and centre of diffusion of Totemism and all that it
stands for. The fact that Totemism extends from West Africa to
North America and was one of the constituent elements in predynastic
Egyptian culture is fatal to the claims of Australia and appears rather
to favour the idea of some prehistoric wave of cultural influence,
starting perhaps in North Africa and gradually extending by South
Arabia and India to South Eastern Asia and Oceania. It is difficult,
however, to believe (with Prof. Elliot Snuth and his school) that this
diffusion was due to the influence of the historic Egyptians. Totemism
in Egypt bears all the marks of a survival from a far earlier type of
culture. It belongs essentially not to the archaic kingdom with its
mastery of agriculture and irrigation but to the hunting tribe, tiie
society that lives in complete dependence on the life of untamed
nature. It would be an amazing paradox, if the most characteristic
institution of the religion-culture of the hunters and the food gadierers

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 RELIGION AND PRIMITIVE CULTURE

had come to them at second hand from the agriculturists and traders
of the archaic culture. It seems preferable to suppose that it formed
part of a distinct culture-complex which was developed by hunting
peoples, perhaps, in North Africa or Western Europe during the latter
pakeolithic period* and was subsequently diffused through the world by
racial movements, and by culture transference, existing even to this
day wherever the conditions of life remain similar to those under which
it was produced, but overlaid by accretions and modifications due to
the influence of later cultures.
THE remarkable resemblances of the different " hunting cultures "
of North America and Siberia, of Australia and South Africa with
that of palaeolithic Europe are too great to be fortuitous. Underlying
them all there is a common religious foundation, a common attitude
to life, which is the key to the interpretation of the culture and which
we may name " the Religion of the Hunter," and which if not primitive
in the strict sense of the word is at least the earliest human religion
of which we have knowledge.
FOR the Primitive peoples belonging to the hunting culture are in
no sense pre-religious or a-religious. They are on the contrary more
religious than the peoples of the higher cultures, since the essential
religion attitude—the sense of dependence on mysterious external
powers—is stronger with them than it is in the case of civilised societies.
The culture-peoples even at their lowest have conquered a certain
autonomy and security against the external world. Nature is to them
partly external and foreign—the forest and the jungle as against the
village and the field—partly conquered and harnessed as in the case of
the domesticated animal and the artificially raised crop. But the
hunter lives always in a state of utter dependence on Nature, such as
we cannot conceive. Nature is always and everywhere his mistress
and mother, and he is a parasite living on her bounty through her
elder and wiser and stronger children, the beasts. Hence the religion
of the primitive hunter is characterised by universality and vaguenem.
He does not single out particular Powers of nature to be divinised and
worshipped as do the men of the archaic civilisations, nor is he, strictly
speaking, an animist, who looks on every manifestation of nature as
the work of individual personal spirits. He is rather a kind of primitive
pantheist or " hekastotheist," as Powell calls him, who sees every-
where behind the outward appearance of things a vague undifferentiated
supernatural power which shows itself alike in beast and plant, in
storm and thunder, in rock and tree, in the magic of the shaman and
in the spirits of the dead. This is the type of religion which Prof.
Marett first described as Pre-Animism, and to which M. Durkhdm
* The rock painting* that exlM near Raigarh in the Central Province and alto in_ the
Kaimur Hilb, which Pix>f. Boule connders to belong to th« lat« pahedithic
period, point to the existence of thi« hunting culture in India abo.

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and hi8 school have given the name of the Religion of Mana. The
latter, however, is not the ideal term, since in Polynesia and Melanesia,
excepting only in the Banks and Torres Islands, Mana is used almost
exclusively to describe the magical powers of individual men,
especially chiefs.
IT is rather among the relatively advanced hunting tribes of North
America that this conception has been most fully developed and can
be most clearly recognised.
THUS Swanton writes of the Tlingit Indians in Alaska : " The Tlingit
do not divide the universe arbitrarily into so many different quarters
ruled by so many supernatural beings. On the contrary, supernatural
power impresses them as a vast immensity, one in kind and impersonal,
inscrutable as to its nature, but whenever manifesting itself to men
taking a personal, and it might be said a human personal form in
whatever aspect it displays itself. Thus the sky spirit is the ocean of
supernatural energy as it manifests itself in the sky, the sea-spirit
as it manifests itself in the sea, the bear spirit as it manifests itself in
the bear, the rock spirit as it manifests itself in the rock, &c. It is
not meant that the Tlingit consciously reasons this out, or formulates
a unity in the supernatural, but such appears to be his unexpressed
feeling. For this reason there appears to be but one name for this
spiritual power, Ydk, a name which is affixed to any specific manifesta-
tion of it, and it is to this perception or feeling reduced to personality,
that the ' Great Spirit' idea seems usually to have affixed itself.
This supernatural energy must be carefully differentiated from natural
energy and never confused with it. It is true that the former is
supposed to bring about results similar to the latter, but in the mind
of the Tlingit the conceived difference between the two is as great
as with us. A rock rolling down hill or an animal running is by no
means a manifestation of supernatural energy, although if somethii^
peculiar be associated with these actions, something outside the
Indian's usual experience of such phenomena, they may be thought
of as such." *
THIS cosmic supernatural power was everywhere recognised by the
peoples of North America under many different names, Orenda,
Wakan, Manito, &c., and it is obvious that while it is neither theism
nor animism it has considerable affinities to both.
M. DuKKHEiM quotes the saying of a Dakota in which we see the
beginnings of a tendency to rationalise or philosophise the vague
primitive belief. " Everything as it moves now and then, here and
there, makes stops. A bird as it flies stops in one place to make its
* J. R. Swantmi. SOCIAL CONDITKWS, BBLIBFS AND LINGUISTIC RILATIONS OP TBB
TuNorr IMIMAN, in 26th Annual Report of Bureau of Anwrican Eduiology,
pp. 4Si-», note.

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 RELIGION AND PRIMITIVE CULTURE

nest and in another place to rest from its flight. A man when he goes
forth stops when he wills. So the god has stopped. The sun, which
is so bright and beautiful, is one place where he has stopped. The
trees, the animals, are where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks
of these places and sends his prayer to reach the place where the god
has stopped and to win health and a blessing." In other words, the
Wakan (for that is what he was talking about) comes and goes through
the world, and sacred things are the points upon which it alights.
Here we are for once just as far from Naturism as from Animism. If
the sun, the moon, and the stars have been adored, they have not
owed this honour to their distinctive properties or their intrinsic
nature, but to the fact that they are thought to participate in this
force, which alone is able to give things a sacred character, and which
is also found in a multitude of other beings, even the smallest. If the
souls of the dead have been the object of rites, it is not because they
are believed to be made out of some fluid and impalpable substance,
nor is it because they resemble the shadow cast by a body or its
reflection on a surface of water. Lightness and fluidity are not enough
to confer sanctity ; they have been invested with this dignity only
in so far as they contained within them something of this same force,
the source of all religiosity." (Durkheim, THE ELEMENTARY FORMS
OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, Eng. tr., pp. 199-200). Now this idea of a
diffused supernatural cosmic power is found almost everywhere
amongst primitive peoples. Among the decadent remnants of the
Palaso-Siberian tribes, among the Melanesians and the Australians, and
among the least advanced of the African peoples. It is often almost
indistinguishable from Animism properly so called, for example,
among the Lango and other Nilotic peoples where Jok, usually trans-
lated God, is conceived at once as a power behind nature and as the
accumulated force of the spirits of the dead. It lies at the root of
primitive magic, which consists essentially in the experimental know-
ledge and control of this supernatural force.*
So, too, according to a writer in the Journal of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute, among the Yao of Nyassaland the word Mulungu is
applied alike to the ancestral spirits, and to the creative power behind
nature, and it is very remarkable that when the same word is taken over
by the missionaries to describe the personal God of their teaching, the
natives added to it a personal prefix " Che"—" Mr. Spirit" as it
* Mita Mary KingBley was fond of tracing the connection hetween the view of Nature
implicit in th« West African^ Fetish Cults and her own vitalistic aoonitm. She
dcacribea certain characteristic utterances of Spinosa and Goethe aa " maonifioent
Fetish," but she argued that the same attitude to Nature, " if you take it up
with no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logiad one alone, will, if
you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white cMlk rim round one eye,
eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance and howl all
night rqieatedly, to the awe of your fellow believers, and the scandal of Moham-
medan gendemen, who have a revealed religion." WEST AFRICAN S
chap. V., esp. p. 104.

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THE SOCIOLOGICAL REVlfiW

were—to distinguish it from the undifferentiated and impersonal

meaning that the word had hitherto bome.
MOREOVER some peoples who possess a fairly well-defined personal
deity, like the Koryaks of N.E. Siberia, have preserved a religious
terminology which points to the former existence of much wider and
vaguer religious conceptions. According to Jochelson, the Koryak
apply the following names to their god (i) Universe or world—lit.
Outer One, (2) Supervisor, (3) Something existing, (4) Existence
or Strength, (5) The One on High, (6) The Master on High, (7) The
Master, (8) The Dawn, (9) The Thunder Man. Among the Siberian
peoples, the general belief, however, is in a number of powers behind
the phenomena of nature, which are distinct from the (evil) spirits,
and from the souls of the dead and are known as " Beings " by the
Chukchi, and as " Masters " or " Owners " by the Gilyak. Thus
there is the Owner of the Mountain, the Owner of the Sea, the Owner
of the Reindeer ; and these powers are propitiated by the hunter and
the fisherman, as the Animal Guardian spirit is in North America.'
FOR the peoples of the hunting culture always see this vague cosmic
power above all manifested and incarnated in the animals. It might
seem at first sight that the conditions of primitive life in which the
hunter lives at war with nature, are irreconcilable with any feelings
of religious reverence towards his prey. Yet we have only to turn
to modern savages to see that this is not so. The beasts are looked
on as stronger and wiser than man. They are the first-bom of nature,
the real lords of the land ; while man is a new-comer—an intruder.
And since he must kill the beasts in order to live, it is necessary for
him in some way to secure the favour of the lords of the beasts them-
selves, that he may do so by their permission.
THERE still exist among the hunting peoples widely spread customs
and ceremonies designed to secure the favour of the animal spirits
before hunting, or to placate the beasts that have been killed.
ESPECIALLY among the northern people from Finland and Lapland
throughout Siberia and North Eastern Asia to North America, we
find these peculiar customs in connection with the hunting and the
killing of the Bear, the most formidable of northem animals, and the
one most apt to inspire reverence and awe. Some tribes of American
Indians prepared for the hunt by fasting and religious rites and by
the offering of expiatory sacrifice to the souls of the bears already
killed. Among the Tlingit of Alaska, when a dead bear was brought
mto camp " its head was carried indoors and eagle down and red paint
put upon it. Then one talked to it as if to a human being, saying,
' I am your friend, I am poor and come to you.' Before the entrails
*CMp)ica, ASOMOINAL SnmuA, p . a62 and passim.

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 RELIGION AND PRIMITIVB

were burned he talked to them saying, ' I am poor, that is why I am

hunting you.' When one came to a bear trail, he said, ' My father's
brother-in-law, have pity upon me, let me be in luck.'" •
AMONG the Koryaks of North East Siberia, when a bear is killed,
" the bear-skin is taken off along with the head and one of the women
puts on the skin, dances in it, and entreats the bear not to be angry
but to be kind to the people." At the same time they offer meat
on a wooden platter to the dead beast, saying, " Eat, friend." After-
wards a ceremony is performed vwth the object of sending the dead
bear, or rather his spirit, away back to his home. He is provided
with provisions for the journey in the shape of puddings or reindeer
fiesh packed in a grass bag. His skin is stuffed with grass and carried
round the house, after which he is supposed to depart towards the
rising sun. The intention of the ceremonies is to protect the people
from the wrath of the slain bear and his kinsfolk and to secure success
in future bear hunts.'
AMONG the Gilyaks of the Amur, every clan has a captive bear cub
which is kept for a year or two, until it is killed and eaten in a solemn
feast of the clan ; after which its soul is despatched to the Owner
of the Mountain, laden with offerings, in order that he may send
more bears for their hunting in the future. As we shall see later on,
the sharing of this " common bear " is an important element in the
social organisation of the Gilyaks.
AND if this attitude to animals obtained even in the 19th century
among American Indians and Siberians with their incomparably
greater resources against nature, how much more must it not have
been so for palaeolithic man, armed with his poor implements of flint
and bone, in the presence of the mighty prehistoric fauna of the
steppes—the bison and the elk, the cave bear and the lion, the mammoth
and the woolly rhinoceros ! And this is proved not merely by a priori
reasoning, but by the evidence of palseolithic art, which consists
almost entirely of animal paintings and sculptures.
WE can be certain that the primitive hunter did not create these works
of art in the depth of dark and inaccessible caverns for the sake of
amusement. Their origin is undoubtedly magical or religious, and
is to be explained by beliefs and practices regarding the animal spirits,
of the type of those we have just described. Indeed, the very use of
cave sanctuaries, such as Magdalenian man used, seems to survive
among the modern hunting peoples, for we read that Apache medicine
men before a hunt "' used to resort to certain caves where they pro-
pitiated the animal gods whose progeny they intended to destroy." '
* Swanton, THB TLINOIT INDIANS, p. 455.
' Jochdion, T H S KORYAK, p. 88, in Fnuser, SPIRITS OF THB CORN AND TKB WILD, II.,
323.
* N. W. Thomu, ».v., ANIMAUS IN HASTINGS, E.R.E., I., 511 b.

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THE 3OCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

THE palaeolithic animal paintings were in fact the magical means by

which man acquired power over the beasts. It was only by the spirit
of the animal that man could overcome the animal. He must magically
conquer and make his own the force of the bison, the swiftness of the
horse, the cunning of the lynx and the wild cat. And this mysterious
transference of power could only be accomplished, in the eyes of
primitive man, through the image—either the dream image or the
dramatically represented image or finally the painted or carven image.
MANY of the cave paintings of Magdalenian times show clear signs
of having been used for magical purposes. The animals, especially
the buffalo, are often marked with signs, intended in all probability
to represent spears, or with cupulas which seem to represent wounds,
or else with " tectiform " signs in the shape of a single rectangular
structure, of which the explanation is more obscure. But there can
be little doubt that all these marks were magical signs by which the
operator " put his power " on the animal, and secured its capture
by the hunter.*
BUT this is not the only explanation of the palaeolithic animal paintings
and sculptures. Many of the caves seem to have been true sanc-
tuaries, and the figures in them the object not merely of utilitarian
magical practices, but of a real cult. For example, the Tuc d'Audou-
bert cave with its famous clay modelled bison, has impressed every
observer as an " Inner sanctuary," which has been the scene of
prehistoric religious rites. And in the case of the modem hunting
peoples of North America the use of animal paintings, though not
without its utilitarian magical side, is primarily connected with a
circle of ideas, which even Sir James Frazer recognises as religious
in the full sense of the word.
THIS is the belief in the Animal-Guardian Spirits, a belief which was
almost universal among the hunting tribes of North America, and
was specially powerful in the regions where agriculture was unknown,
such as Northern and Western Canada.^*
EVERY individual, but particularly the shaman and the chief, was
supposed to possess such a guardian, whom he received through a
*Similat practices are found amot\g the Indians of N . America They also made
drawings of animals with arrow marks on the side or in the heart, or carved
figures upon which they bound a flint arrow head. And in their case we hav«
the actual charms that were recited by the magician, such as—
" I shoot your heart; I hit your heart,
Oh Animal—your heart—I hit your heart."
See illustrations and references for the Zuni and Ojibwa Indians in SOUM'
ANCIBNT HONTHRS*, pp. 424-7-
** This belief was observed by the Spaniards, centuries before Totemism had been
discovered, and was named by them Nagutditm, from the word for the guardian
spirit—Nagual—which was generally used in Central America. Cf. D . G.
Brinton, NAGUALISM, A STUDY m AMEHICAN FOLK LORE AND HISTORY, in Pr.
American Philosophical Society, vol. XXXIII.

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dream or revelation in times of fasting and religious exaltation. Among

the Blackfeet, a man who wished to acquire supernatural power,
would go away by himself into the wildemess, to some place of terror
and mystery—a mountain peak, an island in a lake, a burial ground
or some place abounding in bears and wild beasts. Here he would
remain for days without food or covering, lying for two nights on
his right side and for two nights on his left, fasting and praying to the
helpers. At last, often at the end of the fourth day, a secret helper
would appear to him in a vision—^usually, but not always, in the form
of an animal—and would impart to him its power, and give him
counsel, marking for him his course in life.*^
AMONG the Omaka, according to Fletcher, a boy on attaining the age
of puberty went through a similar ordeal. When he had reached a
secluded spot among the hills, " he must chant the prescribed prayer
uplifting his hands, wet with his tears, to the heavens, and then he
must place his hands on the earth and fast, until he fails asleep or
into a trance. Whatever he sees or hears while in this state is the
being through whom he can receive superhuman aid and comfort."
Later on it is his duty to seek until he finds the animal or bird seen
in his revelation, which he must kill, retaining a small part of it, as a
concrete link with the power that he had seen in his vision. The
writer adds, " This ceremony of initiation rests on the assumption
that man's powers and activities can be supplemented by the elements
and the animals, only through the grace of Wakonda, obtained by the
rite of vision, consisting of ritualistic acts and a fervent prayer of
hvimility explaining a longing for something not possessed, a con-
sciousness of insufficiency of self, and an abiding desire for something
capable of bringing welfare and prosperity to the suppliant." ^*
THE mode of preparation varied in character and severity among the
different peoples. The Mandans even went so far as to cut off the
joints of rfieir fingers, so that according to the Prince of Wied in 1833,
some finger was mutilated amongst all of them, a practice which
suggests comparison with the famous mutilated hand prints in the
palaeolithic cavem of Gargas in the Pyrenees.
IN Western Canada and Alaska, as well as among the Omaka, it was
more often a regular initiation ordeal, which every youth had to undergo,
and in some cases, as among the Shuswap, the making of rock paintings
of the animal guardians was a normal part of the ceremony. But in
every case, the dream image or vision was essential. Writing of the
Westem Dini of the Yukon, Fr. A. G. Morice refers to the import-
ance that they attach to dreams. He says : " It is while dreaming
that they pretended to communicate with the supematural world, that
" Fritter, TOTBMISM AND EXOGAMY, III., 389,
" H A N D B O O K OF THB AMERICAN INDIANS NOKTH OP MSXICO, vol. II., p. 790, art
Totem.

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THB SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

their shamans were invested with their wonderful power over nature,
and that every individual was assigned his particular nagual or
tutelary animal genius. Oftentimes they painted this genius with
venxulion on prominent rocks in the most frequented places, and
these rough inscriptions are about the only monuments that the
immediate ancestors of the D6n6 have left us."
ELSEWHERE he says (the tutelary spirits) " are the link which connects
man with the invisible world, and the only means of communing
with the unseen : these are the personal totems of the Din6s, and
I cannot help thinking of most of the American aborigines as
well. It has been said that Totemism is a purely social institution.
I feel absolutely no hesitation in denying this, at least as far as the
D^n6s are concerned. Totemism among them is essentially and
exclusively connected with their religious system, and I am inclined
to believe that the gentile totem is nothing else than an extension to
the entire clan of an institution, which was originally restricted to
the individual."
" THE personal totem revealed itself usually in dreams, when it appeared
to its future prot6g6 under the shape of an animal, &c., which was
to be thenceforth his tutelary genius Thenceforth the most
intimate connection existed between the two. The native would be
careful to carry on his person and expose in his lodge the spoils of
that animal, its entire skin, or part of it, which he would not suffer
to be treated lightly. Occasionally he would even carve a rough
representation of the totem. He would treasure any object—such
as a stone or a vegetable excrescence—^between which and his totem
he fancied he saw a striking resemblance. He would paint its form
or symbol in bright vermilion on conspicuous rocks ^long lakes or
rivers, &c. Under no' circumstances would anything induce him
wilfully to kill, or at least to cut the flesh of the being, the prototype
of which had become, as it were, sacred to him. In times of need he
would secretly invoke its assistance, saying : " May you do this or
that to me."
" BEFORE an assault on his enemies or previous to his chase of large
game, he would daub its symbol on his bow and arrows, and if success
attended his efforts he would sometimes thank it by destroying any
piece of property on hand, food or clothing, or in later times tobacco,
which he would throw into the water or cast into the fire as a
sacrifice." "
THB8E descriptions suggest parallels in several respects with the
hunting cultures of prehistoric Europe,^* and there is no doubt that
"Rev. A. G. Morice in FRAZ3SR TOTBMISM AND EXOGAMY, III., 440*443.
** Q>. also the Indian custom of a shaman or an initiate wearing the akin or maak
of hia tutelary animal in religious dances or ceremorues with the ptlaoUthic
painting* of men disgtused as aninuils, such as the famousfigureof the torceter "
from thie grotto of the Trois Frire* ( A i ^ )
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 KELIGION AND PRIMITIVE CULTURE

the existence of a similar circle of ideas in palsolithic times would

afford a more satisfactory explanation than is otherwise forthcoming
of the art of the European cave paintings. The wealth of animal
paintings, their variety, and their reduplication one upon another,
are such as might be expected, if the religious ideas and ceremonies
centred round the conception of Animal Guardians and the importance
of the visible image. A great artistic movement such as that of the
palseolithic cave paintings presupposes a powerful emotional founda-
tion in the psychic life of the people, such as we have seen to exist
where the belief in the Animal Guardian Spirit is still prevalent. A
purely utilitarian magic is incapable of producing a great art—in fact,
among primitive people, even more than elsewhere, a great art requires
a strong religious impulse to bring it into being. A totemic origin
has often been suggested for the palaeolithic paintings, for example,
by S. Reinach, but to this it has been rightly objected that there are
no signs of selection of one particular type of animal, such as we should
expect if a tribal totem was being depicted. This objection, however,
does not hold good against the view that the painting represents animal
guardians. Moreover, this view would also explain the existence of
figures of animals which are not good for food, such as the cat or the
lion, and which consequently cannot be explained on purely utilitarian
grounds.
THE idea of the animal guardian cannot, however, be entirely separated
from the question of Totemism. In North America, at any rate, the
two seem to be closely connected. Not only do many tribes, such
as the D^n^, possess at once naguals or individual guardians and clan
totems as well, but also there are certain institutions intermediate
between the two. First of all there are the widespread and important
secret societies, of which the bond of union is the possession of a
common guardian spirit—which therefore appears as a kind of non-
hereditary totem, and secondly among some of the tribes of British
Columbia, the individual guardian can in some cases become hereditary,
passing from father to son—so that it appears as a kind of family
totem.
IN consequence of these facts a connection between the two beliefs
is universally admitted, but while the majority of American ethno-
logists, such as Boas, have seen in Totemism simply the extension to
the community of the conception of the individual Animal Guardian
Spirit, European writers have almost universally adopted the opposite
view, and they maintain that the belief in guardian spirits is the last
trace of a decadent and disappearing Totemism.
THIS view is, however, difficult to reconcile with the actual distribution
of the two institutions in America. As Sir James Frazer has pointed
out, totemic institutions in North America are most fully developed
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THB SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

in the more highly developed and sedentary cultures, for example, in

the Pueblo culture of the south west, and among the Haida and
Tlingit of the North Pacific coast, while they are absent among the
primitive and barbarous peoples of California, and the territories to
the northward. On the other hand, the cult of the guardian spirits
and the beliefs concerning the dream image, are strongest among the
hunters of the plains and the northern forests, and are also found
among the Califomians and the primitive western peoples, while they
are entirely absent among the Pueblo Indians, and almost so among
the Haida.
Now the origin of the belief in Guardian Spirits among a hunting
people is simple. It arises directly from their psychic envirojmient, and
as we have shown, forms an essential part of the hunting culture. The
origins of Totemism on the contrary remain obscure, in spite of half
a century of study and reasearch. To view the belief in the Guardian
Spirits as a relic of Totemism would be to derive the simple from the
complex, and the primitive from the advanced. It is easy to under-
stand how the belief in the guardian spirits of the hunter should pass
away among a sedentary agricultural people like the Pueblo Indians,
or among the trading and fishing villages of the North Pacific coasts
while Totemism, even though it owed its origin to the same circle of
ideas, when once it is embodied in a settled social organisation, will
endure as long as the society continues to exist.
JUDGING the North American evidence by itself, it seems clear that
the Religion of the Hunter—the belief in Animal Guardian Spirits—
lies at the root of the whole development. First come the Guardian
Spirit of the shaman, then that of the ordinary individual; finally,
as population increases and the primitive groups become more com-
plex, the same idea becomes the principle of social organisation, and
we have, on the one hand, the religious confraternity of men who
own a common guardian spirit, i.e., the secret society, on the other,
the group of kinsmen that inherit a common guardian, i.e., the regular
totemic clan.
THIS relatively simple explanation, which adequately covers the
evidence as it exists in North America'*, has, however, met with little
favour in, Europe, partly because it conflicts with the view that
Tot^aoism is essentially a non-religious institution, but still more
because European students of the question almost invariably assume
that in Australia alone do we find Totemism at its purest.
"The bdief in animal guardians is however not confined to America. On the con-
trary, it ia perhaps even more widesptead than the totemic institution itself. It
is found mong the Siberiana, the Melanesians and Pblynedans (the ao-called
" ^ r i t uiimab "),tikeAustraUans, and many African peoi^es. It e-ven qmear*
in a degraded form in European folklore and nu^c, i.e., the animal " funuiar "
of the wizard.
 RELIGION AND PRIMITIVH CULTURE

BUT if, as we have supposed, Totemism is an alien institution intro-

duced among the primitive inhabitants of Australia by representatives
of the hunting culture from Southern Asia, this would not be the case,
and it would be conceivable that the totemism of less primitive
peoples might be more representative of the original type of the
institution. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that peoples like the
North American Indians who possess some knowledge alike of agricul-
ture and of the use of metals, can be better representatives of primitive
conditions than the natives of Australia, who were completely ignorant
of both. But it is in the plains and barren lands of Canada that the natural
conditions of late palaeolithic Europe are most closely paralleled, both
in climate, in flora and in fauna, and it would seem to follow that the
reproduction of the psychological conditions of the primitive hunter
are to be looked for rather in the Indian of the North, who, like his
Magdalenian forerunner, was a parasite of the bison and the reindeer,
than in the Australian, who looks to the wallaby, the lizard and the
wichetty-grub for the sources of his existence.
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON,

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