The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c19.s8.1

v1.c19.s8.1

The nature and meaning of totemism are so uncertain and ill defined that it would be necessary to examine the concept in detail, if it were not for the fact that, on any theory of totemism which does not reduce it to the worship of animals, there is no support for the view that that phenomenon is to be found in Vedic religion. The essential feature of a totemist community as conceived by S. Reinach,² who is now its most consistent supporter, assumes that the men and women of that community conceive themselves severally to be related to some animal or plant or other thing,³ and that they normally treat that plant or animal with great care and respect, only on special occasions in the case of an animal or plant destroying it in the course of a formal meal, in which they enter into communion among themselves and with the god, through devouring the representative of the god: the species and not the mere animal being sacred, as soon as one animal is killed, another takes its place. To this conception of totemism the most value is attributed by Reinach because of his view that the domestication of animals and plants came about through this belief, which he traces to a hypertrophy of the same social instinct which allowed of the growth of human society by forbidding killing within the family and the clan. He does not regard it as primitive in totemism that the members of the totem group should regard the totem as an ancestor: this is in his view the sort of wrong explanation which is inevitably given by savages when asked to explain uses of which they do not know the real origin.