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Chapter II, Part 3 (C) THE TABOO OF THE DEAD
We know that the dead are mighty rulers: we may be surprised to learn that they are regarded
as enemies. Among most primitive people the taboo of the
dead displays, if we may keep to our infection analogy, a peculiar virulence. It manifests
itself in the first place, in the consequences which result from contact with the dead, and
in the treatment of the mourners for the dead. Among the Maori any one who had touched a
corpse or who had taken part in its interment, became extremely unclean and was almost cut
off from intercourse with his fellow beings; he was, as we say, boycotted. He could not
enter a house, or approach persons or objects without infecting them with the same properties.
He could not even touch his food with his own hands, which were now unclean and therefore
quite useless to him. His food was put on the ground and he had no alternative except
to seize it as best he could, with his lips and teeth, while he held his hands behind
on his back. Occasionally he could be fed by another person who helped him to his food
with outstretched arms so as not to touch the unfortunate one himself, but this assistant
was then in turn subjected to almost equally oppressive restrictions. Almost every village
contained some altogether disreputable individual, ostracized by society, whose wretched existence
depended upon people's charity. This creature alone was allowed within arm's length of a
person who had fulfilled the last duty towards the deceased. But as soon as the period of
segregation was over and the person rendered unclean through the corpse could again mingle
with his fellow-beings, all the dishes which he had used during the dangerous period were
broken and all his clothing was thrown away. The taboo customs after bodily contact with
the dead are the same all over Polynesia, in Melanesia, and in a part of Africa; their
most constant feature is the prohibition against handling one's food and the consequent necessity
of being fed by somebody else. It is noteworthy that in Polynesia, or perhaps only in Hawaii,
priest-kings were subject to the same restrictions during the exercise of holy functons. In the
taboo of the dead on the Island of Tonga the abatement and gradual abolition of the prohibitions
through the individual's own taboo power are clearly shown. A person who touched the corpse
of a dead chieftain was unclean for ten months; but if he was himself a chief, he was unclean
for only three, four, or five months, according to the rank of the deceased; if it was the
corpse of the idolized head-chief even the greatest chiefs became taboo for ten months.
These savages are so certain that any one who violates these taboo rules must become
seriously ill and die, that according to the opinion of an observer, they have never yet
dared to convince themselves of the contrary. The taboo restrictions imposed upon persons
whose contact with the dead is to be understood in the transferred sense, namely the mourning
relatives such as widows and widowers, are essentially the same as those mentioned above,
but they are of greater interest for the point we are trying to make. In the rules hitherto
mentioned we see only the typical expression of the virulence and power of diffusion of
the taboo; in those about to be cited we catch a gleam of the motives, including both the
ostensible ones and those which may be regarded as the underlying and genuine motives.
Among the Shuswap in British-Columbia widows and widowers have to remain segregated during
their period of mourning; they must not use their hands to touch the body or the head
and all utensils used by them must not be used by any one else. No hunter will want
to approach the hut in which such mourners live, for that would bring misfortune; if
the shadow of one of the mourners should fall on him he would become ill. The mourners sleep
on thorn bushes, with which they also surround their beds. This last precaution is meant
to keep off the spirit of the deceased; plainer still is the reported custom of other North
American tribes where the widow, after the death of her husband, has to wear a kind of
trousers of dried grass in order to make herself inaccessible to the approach of the spirit.
Thus it is quite obvious that touching 'in the transferred sense' is after all understood
only as bodily contact, since the spirit of the deceased does not leave his kin and does
not desist from 'hovering about them', during the period of mourning.
Among the Agutainos, who live on Palawan, one of the Philippine Islands, a widow may
not leave her hut for the first seven or eight days after her husband's death, except at
night, when she need not expect encounters. Whoever sees her is in danger of immediate
death and therefore she herself warns others of her approach by hitting the trees with
a wooden stick with every step she takes; these trees all wither. Another observation
explains the nature of the danger inherent in a widow. In the district of Mekeo, British
New Guinea, a widower forfeits all civil rights and lives like an outlaw. He may not tend
a garden, or show himself in public, or enter the village or go on the street. He slinks
about like an animal, in the high grass or in the bushes, and must hide in a thicket
if he sees anybody, especially a woman, approaching. This last hint makes it easy for us to trace
back the danger of the widower or widow to the danger of temptation. The husband who
has lost his wife must evade the desire for a substitute; the widow has to contend with
the same wish, and beside this, she may arouse the desire of other men because she is without
a master. Every such satisfaction through a substitute runs contrary to the intention
of mourning and would cause the anger of the spirit to flare up.
One of the most surprising, but at the same time one of the most instructive taboo customs
of mourning among primitive races is the prohibition against pronouncing the name of the deceased.
This is very widespread, and has been subjected to many modifications with important consequences.
Aside from the Australians and the Polynesians, who usually show us taboo customs in their
best state of preservation, we also find this prohibition among races so far apart and unrelated
to each other as the Samojedes in Siberia and the Todas in South India, the Mongolians
of Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Aino of Japan and the Akamba and Nandi
in Central Africa, the Tinguanes in the Philippines and the inhabitants of the Nikobari Islands
and of Madagascar and Borneo. Among some of these races the prohibition and its consequences
hold good only for the period of mourning while in others it remains permanent; but
in all cases it seems to diminish with the lapse of time after the death.
The avoidance of the name of the deceased is as a rule kept up with extraordinary severity.
Thus, among many South American tribes, it is considered the gravest insult to the survivors
to pronounce the name of the deceased in their presence, and the penalty set for it is no
less than that for the slaying itself. At first it is not easy to guess why the mention
of the name should be so abominated, but the dangers associated with it have called into
being a whole series of interesting and important expedients to avoid this. Thus the Masai in
Africa have hit upon the evasion of changing the name of the deceased immediately upon
his death; he may now be mentioned without dread by this new name, while all the prohibitions
remain attached to the old name. It seems to be assumed that the ghost does not know
his new name and will not find it out. The Australian tribes on Adelaide and Encounter
Bay are so consistently cautious that when a death occurs almost every person who has
the same name as the deceased or a very similar one, exchanges it for another. Sometimes by
a further extension of the same idea as seen among several tribes in Victoria and in North
America all the relatives of the deceased change their names regardless of whether their
names resemble the name of the deceased in sound. Among the Guaycuru in Paraguay the
chief used to give new names to all the members of the tribe, on such sad occasions, which
they then remembered as if they had always had them.
Furthermore, if the deceased had the same name as an animal or object, etc., some of
the races just enumerated thought it necessary to give these animals and objects new names,
in order not to be reminded of the deceased when they mentioned them. Through this there
must have resulted a never ceasing change of vocabulary, which caused a good deal of
difficulty for the missionaries, especially where the interdiction upon a name was permanent.
In the seven years which the missionary Dobrizhofer spent among the Abipons in Paraguay, the name
for jaguar was changed three times and the words for crocodile, thorns and animal slaughter
underwent a similar fate. But the dread of pronouncing a name which has belonged to a
deceased person extends also to the mention of everything in which the deceased had any
part, and a further important result of this process of suppression is that these races
have no tradition or any historical reminiscences, so that we encounter the greatest difficulties
in investigating their past history. Among a number of these primitive races compensating
customs have also been established in order to re-awaken the names of the deceased after
a long period of mourning; they are bestowed upon children who were regarded as reincarnations
of the dead. The strangeness of this taboo on names diminishes
if we bear in mind that the savage looks upon his name as an essential part and an important
possession of his personality, and that he ascribes the full significance of things to
words. Our children do the same, as I have shown elsewhere, and therefore they are never
satisfied with accepting a meaningless verbal similarity, but consistently conclude that
when two things have identical names a deeper correspondence between them must exist. Numerous
peculiarities of normal behaviour may lead civilized man to conclude that he too is not
yet as far removed as he thinks from attributing the importance of things to mere names and
feeling that his name has become peculiarly identified with his person. This is corroborated
by psychoanalytic experiences, where there is much occasion to point out the importance
of names in unconscious thought activity. As was to be expected, the compulsion neurotics
behave just like savages in regard to names. They show the full 'complex sensitiveness'
towards the utterance and hearing of special words (as do also other neurotics) and derive
a good many, often serious, inhibitions from their treatment of their own name. One of
these taboo patients whom I knew, had adopted the avoidance of writing down her name for
fear that it might get into somebody's hands who thus would come into possession of a piece
of her personality. In her frenzied faithfulness, which she needed to protect herself against
the temptations of her phantasy, she had created for herself the commandment, 'not to give
away anything of her personality'. To this belonged first of all her name, then by further
application her hand-writing, so that she finally gave up writing.
Thus it no longer seems strange to us that savages should consider a dead person's name
as a part of his personality and that it should be subjected to the same taboo as the deceased.
Calling a dead person by name can also be traced back to contact with him, so that we
can turn our attention to the more inclusive problem of why this contact is visited with
such a severe taboo. The nearest explanation would point to the
natural horror which a corpse inspires, especially in view of the changes so soon noticeable
after death. Mourning for a dead person must also be considered as a sufficient motive
for everything which has reference to him. But horror of the corpse evidently does not
cover all the details of taboo rules, and mourning can never explain to us why the mention
of the dead is a severe insult to his survivors. On the contrary, mourning loves to preoccupy
itself with the deceased, to elaborate his memory, and preserve it for the longest possible
time. Something besides mourning must be made responsible for the peculiarities of taboo
customs, something which evidently serves a different purpose. It is this very taboo
on names which reveals this still unknown motive, and if the customs did not tell us
about it we would find it out from the statements of the mourning savages themselves.
For they do not conceal the fact that they fear the presence and the return of the spirit
of a dead person; they practise a host of ceremonies to keep him off and banish him.
They look upon the mention of his name as a conjuration which must result in his immediate
presence. They therefore consistently do everything to avoid conjuring and awakening a dead person.
They disguise themselves in order that the spirit may not recognize them, they distort
either his name or their own, and become infuriated when a ruthless stranger incites the spirit
against his survivors by mentioning his name. We can hardly avoid the conclusion that they
suffer, according to Wundt's expression, from the fear of "his soul now turned into a demon,".
With this understanding we approach Wundt's conception who, as we have heard, sees the
nature of taboo in the fear of demons. The assumption which this theory makes, namely,
that immediately after death the beloved member of a family becomes a demon, from whom the
survivors have nothing but hostility to expect, so that they must protect themselves by every
means from his evil desires, is so peculiar that our first impulse is not to believe it.
Yet almost all competent authors agree as to this interpretation of primitive races.
Westermarck, who, in my opinion, gives altogether too little consideration to taboo, makes this
statement: "On the whole facts lead me to conclude that the dead are more frequently
regarded as enemies than as friends and that Jevons and Grant Allen are wrong in their
assertion that it was formerly believed that the malevolence of the dead was as a rule
directed only against strangers, while they were paternally concerned about the life and
welfare of their descendants and the members of their clan."
R. Kleinpaul has written an impressive book in which he makes use of the remnants of the
old belief in souls among civilized races to show the relation between the living and
the dead. According to him too, this relation culminates in the conviction that the dead,
thirsting for blood, draw the living after them. The living did not feel themselves safe
from the persecutions of the dead until a body of water had been put between them. That
is why it was preferred to bury the dead on islands or to bring them to the other side
of a river: the expressions 'here' and 'beyond' originated in this way. Later moderation has
restricted the malevolence of the dead to those categories where a peculiar right to
feel rancour had to be admitted, such as the murdered who pursue their murderer as evil
spirits, and those who, like brides, had died with their longings unsatisfied. Kleinpaul
believes that originally, however, the dead were all vampires, who bore ill-will to the
living, and strove to harm them and deprive them of life. It was the corpse that first
furnished the conception of an evil spirit. The hypothesis that those whom we love best
turn into demons after death obviously allows us to put a further question. What prompted
primitive races to ascribe such a change of sentiment to the beloved dead? Why did they
make demons out of them? According to Westermarck this question is easily answered. "As death
is usually considered the worst calamity that can overtake man, it is believed that the
deceased are very dissatisfied with their lot. Primitive races believe that death comes
only through being slain, whether by violence or by magic, and this is considered already
sufficient reason for the soul to be vindictive and irritable. The soul presumably envies
the living and longs for the company of its former kin; we can therefore understand that
the soul should seek to kill with them diseases in order to be re-united with them....
" ...A further explanation of the malevolence ascribed to souls lies in the instinctive
fear of them, which is itself the result of the fear of death."
Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which
includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter
her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting
scruples, called 'obsessive reproaches' which raises the question whether she herself has
not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling
of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt
can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which
in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with
the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches
are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not
that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless,
as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which
she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would
have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this
unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious
behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular
person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human
emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody's disposition;
normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described.
But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation
to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to
compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems,
is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.
We now know how to explain the supposed demonism of recently departed souls and the necessity
of being protected against their hostility through taboo rules. By assuming a similar
high degree of ambivalence in the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis
ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it becomes comprehensible that the
same kind of reaction against the hostility latent in the unconscious behind the obsessive
reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessary here after the painful loss has
occurred. But this hostility which is painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction
with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case of primitive man: the defence
against it is accomplished by displacement upon the object of hostility, namely the dead.
We call this defence process, frequent both in normal and diseased psychic life, a projection.
The survivor will deny that he has ever entertained hostile impulses toward the beloved dead;
but now the soul of the deceased entertains them and will try to give vent to them during
the entire period of mourning. In spite of the successful defence through projection,
the punitive and remorseful character of this emotional reaction manifests itself in being
afraid, in self-imposed renunciations and in subjection to restrictions which are partly
disguised as protective measures against the hostile demon. Thus we find again that taboo
has grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo of the dead
also originates from the opposition between the conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction
at death. If this is the origin of the resentment of spirits it is self-evident that just the
nearest and formerly most beloved survivors have to fear it most.
As in neurotic symptoms, the taboo regulations also evince opposite feelings. Their restrictive
character expresses mourning, while they also betray very clearly what they are trying to
conceal, namely, the hostility towards the dead, which is now motivated as self-defence.
We have learnt to understand part of the taboo regulations as temptation fears. A dead person
is defenceless, which must act as an incitement to satisfy hostile desires entertained against
him; this temptation has to be opposed by the prohibition.
But Westermarck is right in not admitting any difference in the savage's conception
between those who have died by violence and those who have died a natural death. As will
be shown later, in the unconscious mode of thinking even a natural death is perceived
as ***; the person was killed by evil wishes. Any one interested in the origin and meaning
of dreams dealing with the death of dear relatives such as parents and brothers and sisters will
find that the same feeling of ambivalence is responsible for the fact that the dreamer,
the child, and the savage all have the same attitude towards the dead.
A little while ago we challenged Wundt's conception, who explains the nature of taboo through the
fear of demons, and yet we have just agreed with the explanation which traces back the
taboo of the dead to a fear of the soul of the dead after it has turned into a demon.
This seems like a contradiction, but it will not be difficult for us to explain it. It
is true that we have accepted the idea of demons, but we know that this assumption is
not something final which psychology cannot resolve into further elements. We have, as
it were, exposed the demons by recognizing them as mere projections of hostile feelings
which the survivor entertains towards the dead.
The double feeling—tenderness and hostility—against the deceased, which we consider well founded,
endeavours to assert itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction.
A conflict must ensue between these contrary feelings, and as one of them, namely the hostility,
is altogether or for the greater part unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a conscious
difference in the form of hostility or tenderness as, for instance, when we forgive an injury
inflicted upon us by some one we love. The process usually adjusts itself through a special
psychic mechanism, which is designated in psychoanalysis as projection. This unknown
hostility, of which we are ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected
from our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby detached from our own person
and attributed to the other. Not we, the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased,
on the contrary, we mourn for him; but now, curiously enough, he has become an evil demon
who would rejoice in our misfortune and who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend
themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression, but they have
only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction from without.
It is not to be denied that this process of projection, which turns the dead into malevolent
enemies, finds some support in the real hostilities of the dead which the survivors remember and
with which they really can reproach the dead. These hostilities are harshness, the desire
to dominate, injustice, and whatever else forms the background of even the most tender
relations between men. But the process cannot be so simple that this factor alone could
explain the origin of demons by projection. The offences of the dead certainly motivate
in part the hostility of the survivors, but they would have been ineffective if they had
not given rise to this hostility and the occasion of death would surely be the least suitable
occasion for awakening the memory of the reproaches which justly could have been brought against
the deceased. We cannot dispense with the unconscious hostility as the constant and
really impelling motive. This hostile tendency towards those nearest and dearest could remain
latent during their lifetime, that is to say, it could avoid betraying itself to consciousness
either directly or indirectly through any substitutive formation. However, when the
person who was simultaneously loved and hated died, this was no longer possible, and the
conflict became acute. The mourning originating from the enhanced tenderness, became on the
one hand more intolerant of the latent hostility, while on the other hand it could not tolerate
that the latter should not give origin to a feeling of pure gratification. Thus there
came about the repression of the unconscious hostility through projection, and the formation
of the ceremonial in which fear of punishment by demons finds expression. With the termination
of the period of mourning, the conflict also loses its acuteness so that the taboo of the
dead can be abated or sink into oblivion. 4
Having thus explained the basis on which the very instructive taboo of the dead has grown
up, we must not miss the opportunity of adding a few observations which may become important
for the understanding of taboo in general. The projection of unconscious hostility upon
demons in the taboo of the dead is only a single example from a whole series of processes
to which we must grant the greatest influence in the formation of primitive psychic life.
In the foregoing case the mechanism of projection is used to settle an emotional conflict; it
serves the same purpose in a large number of psychic situations which lead to neuroses.
But projection is not specially created for the purpose of defence, it also comes into
being where there are no conflicts. The projection of inner perceptions to the outside is a primitive
mechanism which, for instance, also influences our sense-perceptions, so that it normally
has the greatest share in shaping our outer world. Under conditions that have not yet
been sufficiently determined even inner perceptions of ideational and emotional processes are
projected outwardly, like sense perceptions, and are used to shape the outer world, whereas
they ought to remain in the inner world. This is perhaps genetically connected with the
fact that the function of attention was originally directed not towards the inner world, but
to the stimuli streaming in from the outer world, and only received reports of pleasure
and pain from the endopsychic processes. Only with the development of the language of abstract
thought through the association of sensory remnants of word representations with inner
processes, did the latter gradually become capable of perception. Before this took place
primitive man had developed a picture of the outer world through the outward projection
of inner perceptions, which we, with our reinforced conscious perception, must now translate back
into psychology. The projection of their own evil impulses
upon demons is only a part of what has become the world system ('Weltanschauung') of primitive
man which we shall discuss later as 'animism'. We shall then have to ascertain the psychological
nature of such a system formation and the points of support which we shall find in the
analysis of these system formations will again bring us face to face with the neurosis. For
the present we merely wish to suggest that the 'secondary elaboration' of the dream content
is the prototype of all these system formations. And let us not forget that beginning at the
stage of system formation there are two origins for every act judged by consciousness, namely
the systematic, and the real but unconscious origin.
Wundt remarks that "among the influences which myth everywhere ascribes to demons the evil
ones preponderate, so that according to the religions of races evil demons are evidently
older than good demons." Now it is quite possible that the whole conception of demons was derived
from the extremely important relation to the dead. In the further course of human development
the ambivalence inherent in this relation then manifested itself by allowing two altogether
contrary psychic formations to issue from the same root, namely, the fear of demons
and of ghosts, and the reverence for ancestors. Nothing testifies so much to the influence
of mourning on the origin of belief in demons as the fact that demons were always taken
to be the spirits of persons not long dead. Mourning has a very distinct psychic task
to perform, namely, to detach the memories and expectations of the survivors from the
dead. When this work is accomplished the grief, and with it the remorse and reproach, lessens,
and therefore also the fear of the demon. But the very spirits which at first were feared
as demons now serve a friendlier purpose; they are revered as ancestors and appealed
to for help in times of distress. If we survey the relation of survivors to
the dead through the course of the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling
has extraordinarily abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever unconscious hostility
towards the dead there may still exist without any special psychic effort on our part. Where
formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety,
which appears like a cicatrice and demands: De mortuis nil nisi bene. Only neurotics still
blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches
which psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this change was brought
about, and to what extent constitutional changes and real improvement of familiar relations
share in causing the abatement of the ambivalent feeling, need not be discussed here. But this
example would lead us to assume that the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a higher
degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human beings. With the decline
of this ambivalence the taboo, as the compromise symptom of the ambivalent conflict, also slowly
disappeared. Neurotics who are compelled to reproduce this conflict, together with the
taboo resulting from it, may be said to have brought with them an atavistic remnant in
the form of an archaic constitution the compensation of which in the interest of cultural demands
entails the most prodigious psychic efforts on their part.
At this point we may recall the confusing information which Wundt offered us about the
double meaning of the word taboo, namely, holy and unclean (see above). It was supposed
that originally the word taboo did not yet mean holy and unclean but signified something
demonic, something which may not be touched, thus emphasizing a characteristic common to
both extremes of the later conception; this persistent common trait proves, however, that
an original correspondence existed between what was holy and what was unclean, which
only later became differentiated. In contrast to this, our discussion readily
shows that the double meaning in question belonged to the word taboo from the very beginning
and that it serves to designate a definite ambivalence as well as everything which has
come into existence on the basis of this ambivalence. Taboo is itself an ambivalent word and by
way of supplement we may add that the established meaning of this word might of itself have
allowed us to guess what we have found as the result of extensive investigation, namely,
that the taboo prohibition is to be explained as the result of an emotional ambivalence.
A study of the oldest languages has taught us that at one time there were many such words
which included their own contrasts so that they were in a certain sense ambivalent, though
perhaps not exactly in the same sense as the word taboo. Slight vocal modifications of
this primitive word containing two opposite meanings later served to create a separate
linguistic expression for the two opposites originally united in one word.
The word taboo has had a different fate; with the diminished importance of the ambivalence
which it connotes it has itself disappeared, or rather, the words analogous to it have
vanished from the vocabulary. In a later connection I hope to be able to show that a tangible
historic change is probably concealed behind the fate of this conception; that the word
at first was associated with definite human relations which were characterized by great
emotional ambivalence from which it expanded to other analogous relations.
Unless we are mistaken, the understanding of taboo also throws light upon the nature
and origin of conscience. Without stretching ideas we can speak of a taboo conscience and
a taboo sense of guilt after the violation of a taboo. Taboo conscience is probably the
oldest form in which we meet the phenomenon of conscience.
For what is 'conscience'? According to linguistic testimony it belongs to what we know most
surely; in some languages its meaning is hardly to be distinguished from consciousness.
Conscience is the inner perception of objections to definite wish impulses that exist in us;
but the emphasis is put upon the fact that this rejection does not have to depend on
anything else, that it is sure of itself. This becomes even plainer in the case of a
guilty conscience, where we become aware of the inner condemnation of such acts which
realized some of our definite wish impulses. Confirmation seems superfluous here; whoever
has a conscience must feel in himself the justification of the condemnation, and the
reproach for the accomplished action. But this same character is evinced by the attitude
of savages towards taboo. Taboo is a command of conscience, the violation of which causes
a terrible sense of guilt which is as self-evident as its origin is unknown.
It is therefore probable that conscience also originates on the basis of an ambivalent feeling
from quite definite human relations which contain this ambivalence. It probably originates
under conditions which are in force both for taboo and the compulsion neurosis, that is,
one component of the two contrasting feelings is unconscious and is kept repressed by the
compulsive domination of the other component. This is confirmed by many things which we
have learned from our analysis of neurosis. In the first place the character of compulsion
neurotics shows a predominant trait of painful conscientiousness which is a symptom of reaction
against the temptation which lurks in the unconscious, and which develops into the highest
degrees of guilty conscience as their illness grows worse. Indeed, one may venture the assertion
that if the origin of guilty conscience could not be discovered through compulsion neurotic
patients, there would be no prospect of ever discovering it. This task is successfully
solved in the case of the individual neurotic, and we are confident of finding a similar
solution in the case of races. In the second place we cannot help noticing
that the sense of guilt contains much of the nature of anxiety; without hesitation it may
be described as 'conscience phobia'. But fear points to unconscious sources. The psychology
of the neuroses taught us that when wish feelings undergo repression their libido becomes transformed
into anxiety. In addition we must bear in mind that the sense of guilt also contains
something unknown and unconscious, namely the motivation for the rejection. The character
of anxiety in the sense of guilt corresponds to this unknown quantity.
If taboo expresses itself mainly in prohibitions it may well be considered self-evident, without
remote proof from the analogy with neurosis that it is based on a positive, desireful
impulse. For what nobody desires to do does not have to be forbidden, and certainly whatever
is expressly forbidden must be an object of desire. If we applied this plausible theory
to primitive races we would have to conclude that among their strongest temptations were
desires to kill their kings and priests, to commit ***, to abuse their dead and the
like. That is not very probable. And if we should apply the same theory to those cases
in which we ourselves seem to hear the voice of conscience most clearly we would arouse
the greatest contradiction. For there we would assert with the utmost certainty that we did
not feel the slightest temptation to violate any of these commandments, as for example,
the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, and that we felt nothing but repugnance at the
very idea. But if we grant the testimony of our conscience
the importance it claims, then the prohibition—the taboo as well as our moral prohibitions—becomes
superfluous, while the existence of a conscience, in turn, remains unexplained and the connection
between conscience, taboo and neurosis disappears. The net result of this would then be our present
state of understanding unless we view the problem psychoanalytically.
But if we take into account the following results of psychoanalysis, our understanding
of the problem is greatly advanced. The analysis of dreams of normal individuals has shown
that our own temptation to kill others is stronger and more frequent than we had suspected
and that it produces psychic effects even where it does not reveal itself to our consciousness.
And when we have learnt that the obsessive rules of certain neurotics are nothing but
measures of self-reassurance and self-punishment erected against the reinforced impulse to
commit ***, we can return with fresh appreciation to our previous hypothesis that every prohibition
must conceal a desire. We can then assume that this desire to *** actually exists
and that the taboo as well as the moral prohibition are psychologically by no means superfluous
but are, on the contrary, explained and justified through our ambivalent attitude towards the
impulse to slay. The nature of this ambivalent relation so
often emphasized as fundamental, namely, that the positive underlying desire is unconscious,
opens the possibility of showing further connections and explaining further problems. The pyschic
processes in the unconscious are not entirely identical with those known to us from our
conscious psychic life, but have the benefit of certain notable liberties of which the
latter are deprived. An unconscious impulse need not have originated where we find it
expressed, it can spring from an entirely different place and may originally have referred
to other persons and relations, but through the mechanism of displacement, it reaches
the point where it comes to our notice. Thanks to the indestructibility of unconscious processes
and their inaccessibility to correction, the impulse may be saved over from earlier times
to which it was adapted to later periods and conditions in which its manifestations must
necessarily seem foreign. These are all only hints, but a careful elaboration of them would
show how important they may become for the understanding of the development of civilization.
In closing these discussions we do not want to neglect to make an observation that will
be of use for later investigations. Even if we insist upon the essential similarity between
taboo and moral prohibitions we do not dispute that a psychological difference must exist
between them. A change in the relations of the fundamental ambivalence can be the only
reason why the prohibition no longer appears in the form of a taboo.
In the analytical consideration of taboo phenomena we have hitherto allowed ourselves to be guided
by their demonstrable agreements with compulsion neurosis; but as taboo is not a neurosis but
a social creation we are also confronted with the task of showing wherein lies the essential
difference between the neurosis and a product of culture like the taboo.
Here again I will take a single fact as my starting point. Primitive races fear a punishment
for the violation of a taboo, usually a serious disease or death. This punishment threatens
only him who has been guilty of the violation. It is different with the compulsion neurosis.
If the patient wants to do something that is forbidden to him he does not fear punishment
for himself, but for another person. This person is usually indefinite, but, by means
of analysis, is easily recognized as some one very near and dear to the patient. The
neurotic therefore acts as if he were altruistic, while primitive man seems egotistical. Only
if retribution fails to overtake the taboo violator spontaneously does a collective feeling
awaken among savages that they are all threatened through the sacrilege, and they hasten to
inflict the omitted punishment themselves. It is easy for us to explain the mechanism
of this solidarity. It is a question of fear of the contagious example, the temptation
to imitate, that is to say, of the capacity of the taboo to infect. If some one has succeeded
in satisfying the repressed desire, the same desire must manifest itself in all his companions;
hence, in order to keep down this temptation, this envied individual must be despoiled of
the fruit of his daring. Not infrequently the punishment gives the executors themselves
an opportunity to commit the same sacrilegious act by justifying it as an expiation. This
is really one of the fundamentals of the human code of punishment which rightly presumes
the same forbidden impulses in the criminal and in the members of society who avenge his
offence. Psychoanalysis here confirms what the pious
were wont to say, that we are all miserable sinners. How then shall we explain the unexpected
nobility of the neurosis which fears nothing for itself and everything for the beloved
person? Psychoanalytic investigation shows that this nobility is not primary. Originally,
that is to say at the beginning of the disease, the threat of punishment pertained to one's
own person; in every case the fear was for one's own life; the fear of death being only
later displaced upon another beloved person. The process is somewhat complicated but we
have a complete grasp of it. An evil impulse—a death wish—towards the beloved person is
always at the basis of the formation of a prohibition. This is repressed through a prohibition,
and the prohibition is connected with a certain act which by displacement usually substitutes
the hostile for the beloved person, and the execution of this act is threatened with the
penalty of death. But the process goes further and the original wish for the death of the
beloved other person is then replaced by fear for his death. The tender altruistic trait
of the neurosis therefore merely compensates for the opposite attitude of brutal egotism
which is at the basis of it. If we designate as social those emotional impulses which are
determined through regard for another person who is not taken as a *** object, we can
emphasize the withdrawal of these social factors as an essential feature of the neurosis, which
is later disguised through overcompensation. Without lingering over the origin of these
social impulses and their relation to other fundamental impulses of man, we will bring
out the second main characteristic of the neurosis by means of another example. The
form in which taboo manifests itself has the greatest similarity to the touching phobia
of neurotics, the Délire de toucher. As a matter of fact this neurosis is regularly
concerned with the prohibition of *** touching and psychoanalysis has quite generally shown
that the motive power which is deflected and displaced in the neurosis is of *** origin.
In taboo the forbidden contact has evidently not only *** significance but rather the
more, general one of attack, of acquisition and of personal assertion. If it is prohibited
to touch the chief or something that was in contact with him it means that an inhibition
should be imposed upon the same impulse which on other occasions expresses itself in suspicious
surveillance of the chief and even in physical ill-treatment of him before his coronation
(see above). Thus the preponderance of *** components of the impulse over the social
components is the determining factor of the neurosis. But the social impulses themselves
came into being through the union of egotistical and *** components into special entities.
From this single example of a comparison between taboo and compulsion neurosis it is already
possible to guess the relation between individual forms of the neurosis and the creations of
culture, and in what respect the study of the psychology of the neurosis is important
for the understanding of the development of culture.
In one way the neuroses show a striking and far-reaching correspondence with the great
social productions of art, religion and philosophy, while again they seem like distortions of
them. We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis,
a caricature of a religion, and a paranoic delusion, a caricature of a philosophic system.
In the last analysis this deviation goes back to the fact that the neuroses are asocial
formations; they seek to accomplish by private means what arose in society through collective
labour. In analysing the impulse of the neuroses one learns that motive powers of *** origin
exercise the determining influence in them, while the corresponding cultural creations
rest upon social impulses and on such as have issued from the combination of egotistical
and *** components. It seems that the *** need is not capable of uniting men in the
same way as the demands of self preservation; *** satisfaction is in the first place
the private concern of the individual. Genetically the asocial nature of the neurosis
springs from its original tendency to flee from a dissatisfying reality to a more pleasurable
world of phantasy. This real world which neurotics shun is dominated by the society of human
beings and by the institutions created by them; the estrangement from reality is at
the same time a withdrawal from human companionship.
End of Part 3 of Chapter II 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 rôle 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.
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. Tylor. 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 to-day 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 being very similar to individuals; only in the course of a long evolution did they
lose their material character and attain a high degree of 'spiritualization'.
Most authors incline 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 conclusion. 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, Wundt states that these "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 in so far
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: "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". 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 to-day, 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.
2 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.
Reinach wants to call these directions, which are known under the names of 'sorcery and
magic', the strategy of animism; With Mauss 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 favourably 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 E. B. Tylor at its face value it can be most tersely expressed
in his words: "mistaking an ideal connection for a real one". 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 Frazer: "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 Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent
with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon's name was written in green ink.
Wrapt 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, waxen effigies of each of his principle 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 and
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 disk. 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 shone out triumphant
once more". 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 rôle among primitive races and which have been partly preserved in the 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
and storm which produce it. It looks as if they wanted to 'play rain'. The Ainos 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 *** 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 *** intercourse
when the rice was about to blossom in order to stimulate the rice to fruitfulness through
their example. At the same time it was feared that proscribed 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 a 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 hunters' fingers and would let the quarry
slip through their hands. Or when a Gilyak 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 difficulties 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. Frazer
therefore calls this kind of magic imitative or homœopathic. 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 belonged to that person. From this there 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, XXVIII, advises spitting on the hand which has caused
the injury if one regrets having injured some one; 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 salve on the weapon which has made a wound will cause this wound
to heal of itself. It is said that even to-day 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 bade 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
Frazer'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 Tylor's quoted characteristic
of magic: "mistaking an ideal connection for a real one", proves to be. The same may be
said of Frazer's idea, who has expressed it in almost the same terms: "men mistook the
order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which
they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to have a corresponding control
over things". 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 paths 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 Frazer'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 Frazer this may be practised 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 fulfilment 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 of 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 over-valuation 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 fulfilment 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, though such
procedures are still practised, the psychic phenomenon of scepticism already manifests
itself as a tendency to repression. At that stage men will acknowledge that the conjuration
of spirits 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 over-valuation 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 over-estimation of the latter.
Objects as such are over-shadowed 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 to 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,
and 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. In 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'. 3
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 imprecation 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,
where 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 the 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 affectively 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 phantasy, though in the last analysis they go back to real events
or have been built up from them. The neurotic's 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 towards his fellow
beings in a most considerate and scrupulous manner, a behaviour which he evinced since
his childhood. And yet his sense of guilt is justified; it is based upon intensive and
frequent death wishes which unconsciously manifest themselves towards 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 over-estimation of psychic processes as opposed
to reality, proves to be of unlimited effect in the neurotic's affective 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 wont 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 formulæ 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 ***, only to end up as a
substitute for forbidden *** 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
*** impulses can be recognized from the beginning, but at first they are not yet directed
to any outer object. Each individual component of the *** impulse works for a gain in
pleasure and finds its gratification in its own body. This stage is called autoerotism
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 autoerotism
into two. In this intermediary stage, the importance of which increases the more we
investigate it, the *** 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 narcism, 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 narcistic stage, in which the hitherto dissociated *** impulses combine
into a unity and take the ego as their object, cannot as yet be sharply differentiated, we
can already surmise that the narcistic organization is never altogether given up again. To a certain
extent man remains narcistic, even after he had found outer subjects for his libido, and
the objects on 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 narcism, 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 had remained as a constitutional factor, while
on the other hand the *** 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 regressively,
the psychic results are the same, namely, intellectual narcism and omnipotence of thought.
If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among primitive races as a proof
of their narcism, we may venture to compare the various evolutionary stages of man's conception
of 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 narcism, 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's
stage of maturity where, 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
served tendencies which to-day have for the greater part ceased to exist. Among these
we may suspect various magic intentions. 4
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, for 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 what 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 rôle, 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 R. R.
Marett, 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 a 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 effects, populated the world with them and then rediscovered
his inner psychic processes outside himself, quite like the ingenious paranoiac Schreber,
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 analysed in detail
in the situation of the mourner at the death of one dear to him. Such a case appeals to
us 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 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 moral 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
favour of a simultaneous origin. If it really were the situation of the survivor confronted
by the dead 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 [Greek: ἁνἁγκη
anagkê], which opposes man's narcism. 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 wholly immaterial soul, nevertheless shares
its nature and therefore looks upon a person or a 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 in 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 co-existence
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 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; to-day 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 learnt 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 contents to another. The dream
succeeds more or less in this, but hardly ever succeeds so completely that 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 re-grouping 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 favour 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 connexion if, as a result of special circumstances,
it cannot grasp the right one. We know such system formation 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 delusional states (paranoia) and dominates the clinical
picture, but it also must not be overlooked in other forms of neuropsychoses. In every
case we can show that a re-arrangement 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 Maori. The neurosis
of this woman was directed against her husband and culminated in the defence 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 reconnoitre 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 neighbourhood. 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 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 defence against it. All the patient's remaining unconscious phantasies 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 connexion is
only apparent. Sharper observation can reveal, as in the formation of the façade 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 to-day 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 too, progress and evolution have taken place,
which unjustly have been under-estimated 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 cruel and hostile impulses
otherwise forbidden. The same holds good for the numerous cases of *** 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 root. 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
far away 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 thwarts 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 æsthetic 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 sites 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 III
CHAPTER IV THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM
The reader need not fear that psychoanalysis, 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. 1
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 MacLennan 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 this significance
of totemism. I quote a passage from the Elements of the Psychology of Races by W. Wundt (1912),
as the latest utterance on this question: '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.' 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. Reinach, who in the year 1900 sketched the following
Code du Totémisme in twelve articles, like a catechism of the totemic religion:
1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up individual animals of these
species and take care of them. 2. An animal that dies accidentally is mourned
and buried with the same honours as a member of the tribe.
3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes refers only to a certain part of the animal.
4. 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. 5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual,
it is solemnly mourned. 6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious
ceremonies, the skins of certain animals are donned. Where totemism still exists, these
are totem animals. 7. Tribes and individuals assume the names
of totem animals. 8. 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. 9. 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. 10. 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 Reinach has here also incorporated all
the signs and clews 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 J. G. Frazer,
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.
"A totem," wrote Frazer in his first essay, "is a class of material objects which a savage
regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member
of the class an intimate and altogether special relation. The connexion 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 fetich, a totem is never an isolated
individual but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants,
more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects."
At least three kinds of totem can be distinguished: 1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe shares
and which is hereditary from generation to generation,
2. The sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine members of a tribe to
the exclusion of the opposite sex, and 3. The individual totem which belongs to the
individual and does not descend to his successors. The last two kinds of totem are comparatively
of little importance compared to the tribal totem. Unless we are mistaken they are recent
formations and of little importance as far as the nature of the taboo is concerned.
The tribal totem (clan totem) is the object of veneration of a group of men and women
who take their name from the totem and consider themselves consanguineous offspring of a common
ancestor, and who 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 its
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 had
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, Frazer lays 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. Frazer thinks that oaths were originally ordeals,
many tests as to descent 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 *** and the clan of the slain man shows its solidarity
in 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 *** intercourse whatsoever with
each other. This is the famous and enigmatic exogamy connexion 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 *** dread of primitive races, that it becomes
entirely comprehensible as a security against *** in group marriages, and that at first
it accomplishes the avoidance of *** 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 Frazer, 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. Wundt says: "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 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 the significant contradictory phenomenon found in this connexion, namely,
that under certain conditions there was a kind of ceremonial consumption 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." 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 *** intercourse
with each other. It may now seem strange to us that in the
Code du totémisme which Reinach 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 Reinach is an author to whose work in
this field we owe much and I have chosen his presentation in order to prepare us for the
differences of opinion among the authors, which will now occupy our attention.
2 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 of 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 *** taboo which it represents)
and the relation between the two, the totem organization and the *** prohibition. The
understanding should be at once historical and psychological; it should inform us under
what conditions this peculiar institution developed and to 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 Frazer in 1887, cannot escape the criticism that it expresses an arbitrary preference
of the author and would be challenged to-day by Frazer himself, who has repeatedly changed
his view on the subject. It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism
and exogamy could be most readily 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 altogether 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 altogether
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 the 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 liquet. 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, B. Goldenweiser in the Journal of American
Folklore XXIII, 1910. Reviewed in the Brittanica Year Book, 1913.) 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, MacLennan, who discovered totemism and exogamy for science, refrained 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, ([Greek: α a]) nominalistic,
([Greek: β b]) sociological, ([Greek: γ g]) psychological.
([Greek: α a]) 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 Inkas, who wrote the history of his
race in the seventeenth 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. Keane where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges through which individuals,
families and tribes wanted to differentiate themselves.
Max Müller expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem in his Contributions
to the Science of Mythology. A totem is said to be, 1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name,
3. the name of the ancestor of the clan, 4. the name of the object which the clan reveres.
J. Pikler 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
deduced 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 honour 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 Avebury (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 in his books, Social Origins, 1903, and
The Secret of the Totem, 1905. This theory still makes naming the centre 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 acquired their animal names. It might be assumed that one day they
awoke 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 to-day 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 all the totemic prohibitions of the blood taboo, including
exogamy. "No more than these three things—a group
animal name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connexion between all bearers,
human and ***, of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions—were needed to
give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, including exogamy" (Secret of the Totem, p.
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
borne (The Guises, Whigs and Tories). The assumption that the origin of these names
was forgotten in the course of time connects this second part of the Lang theory with the
first one just mentioned. ([Greek: β b]) The Sociological Theories
S. Reinach, 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 "une hypertrophie de l'instinct social."
The same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of E. Durkheim, Les Formes Élémentaires
de la Vie Religieuse; Le Systême Totémique en 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 A. C. Haddon 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 rôle 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 referred food. The first of the three theories about the
origin of totemism which Frazer stated was a psychological one. We shall report it elsewhere.
Frazer's 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 Frazer 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:
1. They have the division into totem clans but the totem is not hereditary but is individually
determined (as will be shown later). 2. 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.
3. 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 Intichiuma.)
4. The Aruntas have a peculiar theory about conception and re-birth. They assume that
the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem wait for their re-birth 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 re-born) are bound to peculiar stone amulets, called Churinga,
which are found in these places. Two factors seem to have induced Frazer 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 *** act in their theory
of conception. People who have not yet realized that conception was the result of the ***
act might well be considered the most backward and primitive people living to-day.
Frazer, in having recourse to the Intichiuma 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 Haddon above.) The system was
simply an extraordinary piece of 'co-operative 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 Intichiuma ceremony, it appeared to Frazer 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.
Frazer 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 abstained 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 endeavour to make the being favourably disposed by sparing it. Frazer 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. Frazer's theory based on the Intichiuma, stands
or 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 Frazer because they emphasize, in contrast to prevailing
institutions of to-day, that the Aruntas are free to eat the totem and to marry within
it, easily explain themselves to us as wish phantasies, which are projected into the past,
like the myths of the Golden Age. ([Greek: γ g]) The Psychological Theories
Frazer's first psychological theories, formed before his acquaintance with the observations
of Spencer and Gillen, 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. Frazer himself later gave up
this derivation of totemism from the belief in souls.
When he became acquainted with the observations of Spencer and Gillen 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
co-operative 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 establish no
connexion between conception and the *** 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 re-birth, 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. W.
H. R. Rivers' observations among the inhabitants of the Bank Islands seemed 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 rôle
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 fancies, so natural and seemingly so universal, appear to be the root
of totemism. The main objection to this third theory of
Frazer's is the same which has already been advanced against his second, sociological
theory. The Aruntas seem 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 honour the ancestral spirits. Though they raise 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, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a connexion
between totemism and the migration of souls. "The animal into which, according to general
belief, the souls of the dead passed, became a blood relative, an ancestor, and was revered
as such." But the belief in the soul's 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
Wundt; in the first place, that the original and most widely known totem object was an
animal, and secondly, that the earliest totem animals corresponded 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 bearers of souls which leave their bodies. The totem animal is a
descendant of the animal transformations of the spirit-soul. Thus with Wundt totemism
is directly connected with the belief in souls or with animism.