This relationship does not come from the fact that they have definite blood connections with one another; they are relatives from the mere fact that they have the same name. They are not fathers and mothers, sons or daughters, uncles or nephews of one another in the sense which we now give these words; yet they think of themselves as forming a single family, which is large or small according to the dimensions of the clan, merely because they are collectively designated by the same word. When we say that they regard themselves as a single family, we do so because they recognize duties towards each other which are identical with those which have always been incumbent upon kindred: such duties as aid, vengeance, mourning, the obligation not to marry among themselves, etc.
By this first characteristic, the clan does not differ from the Roman gens or the Greek γένος; for this relationship also came merely from the fact that all the members of the gens had the same name,[215] the nomen gentilicium. And in one sense, the gens is a clan; but it is a variety which should not be confounded with the Australian clan.[216] This latter is distinguished by the fact that its name is also the name of a determined species of material things with which it believes that it has very particular relations, the nature of which we shall presently describe; they are especially relations of kinship. The species of things which serves to designate the clan collectively is called its totem. The totem of the clan is also that of each of its members.
Each clan has its totem, which belongs to it alone; two different clans of the same tribe cannot have the same. In fact, one is a member of a clan merely because he has a certain name. All who bear this name are members of it for that very reason; in whatever manner they may be spread over the tribal territory, they all have the same relations of kinship with one another.[217] Consequently, two groups having the same totem can only be two sections of the same clan. Undoubtedly, it frequently happens that all of a clan does not reside in the same locality, but has representatives in several different places. However, this lack of a geographical basis does not cause its unity to be the less keenly felt.
In regard to the word totem, we may say that it is the one employed by the Ojibway, an Algonquin tribe, to designate the sort of thing whose name the clan bears.[218] Although this expression is not at all Australian,[219] and is found only in one single society in America, ethnographers have definitely adopted it, and use it to denote, in a general way, the system which we are describing. Schoolcraft was the first to extend the meaning of the word thus and to speak of a "totemic system."[220] This extension, of which there are examples enough in ethnography, is not without inconveniences. It is not normal for an institution of this importance to bear a chance name, taken from a strictly local dialect, and bringing to mind none of the distinctive characteristics of the thing it designates. But to-day this way of employing the word is so universally accepted that it would be an excess of purism to rise against this usage.[221]
In a very large proportion of the cases, the objects which serve as totems belong either to the animal or the vegetable kingdom, but especially to the former. Inanimate things are much more rarely employed. Out of more than 500 totemic names collected by Howitt among the tribes of south-eastern Australia, there are scarcely forty which are not the names of plants or animals; these are the clouds, rain, hail, frost, the moon, the sun, the wind, the autumn, the summer, the winter, certain stars, thunder, fire, smoke, water or the sea. It is noticeable how small a place is given to celestial bodies and, more generally, to the great cosmic phenomena, which were destined to so great a fortune in later religious development. Among all the clans of which Howitt speaks, there were only two which had the moon as totem,[222] two the sun,[223] three a star,[224] three the thunder,[225] two the lightning.[226] The rain is a single exception; it, on the contrary, is very frequent.[227]
These are the totems which can be spoken of as normal. But totemism has its abnormalities as well. It sometimes happens that the totem is not a whole object, but the part of an object. This fact appears rather rarely in Australia;[228] Howitt cites only one example.[229] However, it may well be that this is found with a certain frequency in the tribes where the totemic groups are excessively subdivided; it might be said that the totems had to break themselves up in order to be able to furnish names to these numerous divisions. This is what seems to have taken place among the Arunta and the Loritja. Strehlow has collected 442 totems in these two societies, of which many are not an animal species, but some particular organ of the animal of the species, such as the tail or stomach of an opossum, the fat of the kangaroo, etc.[230]
We have seen that normally the totem is not an individual, but a species or a variety: it is not such and such a kangaroo or crow, but the kangaroo or crow in general. Sometimes, however, it is a particular object. First of all, this is necessarily the case when the thing serving as totem is unique in its class, as the sun, the moon, such or such a constellation, etc. It also happens that clans take their names from certain geographical irregularities or depressions of the land, from a certain ant-hill, etc. It is true that we have only a small number of examples of this in Australia; but Strehlow does mention some.[231] But the very causes which have given rise to these abnormal totems show that they are of a relatively recent origin. In fact, what has made certain geographical features of the land become totems is that a mythical ancestor is supposed to have stopped there or to have performed some act of his legendary life there.[232] But at the same time, these ancestors are represented in the myths as themselves belonging to clans which had perfectly regular totems, that is to say, ones taken from the animal or vegetable kingdoms. Therefore, the totemic names thus commemorating the acts and performances of these heroes cannot be primitive; they belong to a form of totemism that is already derived and deviated. It is even permissible to ask if the meteorological totems have not a similar origin; for the sun, the moon and the stars are frequently identified with the ancestors of the mythological epoch.[233]
Sometimes, but no less exceptionally, it is an ancestor or a group of ancestors which serves as totem directly. In this case, the clan takes its name, not from a thing or a species of real things, but from a purely mythical being. Spencer and Gillen had already mentioned two or three totems of this sort. Among the Warramunga and among the Tjingilli there are clans which bear the name of an ancestor named Thaballa who seems to be gaiety incarnate.[234] Another Warramunga clan bears the name of a huge fabulous serpent named Wollunqua, from which the clan considers itself descended.[235] We owe other similar facts to Strehlow.[236] In any case, it is easy enough to see what probably took place. Under the influence of diverse causes and by the very development of mythological thought, the collective and impersonal totem became effaced before certain mythical personages who advanced to the first rank and became totems themselves.
Howsoever interesting these different irregularities may be, they contain nothing which forces us to modify our definition of a totem. They are not, as has sometimes been believed,[237] different varieties of totems which are more or less irreducible into each other or into the normal totem, such as we have defined it. They are merely secondary and sometimes even aberrant forms of a single notion which is much more general, and there is every ground for believing it the more primitive.
The manner in which the name is acquired is more important for the organization and recruiting of the clan than for religion; it belongs to the sociology of the family rather than to religious sociology.[238] So we shall confine ourselves to indicating summarily the most essential principles which regulate the matter.
In the different tribes, three different systems are in use.
In a great number, or it might even be said, in the greater number of the societies, the child takes the totem of its mother, by right of birth: this is what happens among the Dieri and the Urabunna of the centre of Southern Australia; the Wotjobaluk and the Gournditch-Mara of Victoria; the Kamilaroi, the Wiradjuri, the Wonghibon and the Euahlayi of New South Wales; and the Wakelbura, the Pitta-Pitta and the Kurnandaburi of Queensland, to mention only the most important names. In this case, owing to a law of exogamy, the mother is necessarily of a different totem from her husband, and on the other hand, as she lives in his community, the members of a single totem are necessarily dispersed in different localities according to the chances of their marriages. As a result,
