Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of MankindWundt, Wilhelm Max
Science
Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Wundt, Wilhelm Max
Ethnopsychology
then enter into the development. In addition to the blood, the inner
parts of the body, which are exposed in cases of violent death, become
vehicles of the soul. The idea of the sudden departure of the soul
is then transferred from the one who is killed to the dying person in
general. With the exhalation of his last breath, his soul is thought
to depart from him. The soul is therefore conceived as a moving form,
particularly as an animal, a bird, a rapidly gliding snake, or a lizard.
In dealing, later, with the soul conceptions of the totemic age, we
will consider these several motives in their independent influence
as well as in their reciprocal action upon one another. Here we can
touch upon them only in so far as they harbour the sources of totemism
itself. But in this connection two facts are of decisive importance.
In the first place, the original totem, and the one which continues
to remain most common, is the animal; and, secondly, the earliest
totem animals are identical with soul animals. But in addition to soul
animals, other animals also may later readily come to be regarded
as totems, particularly such as continually claim man's attention,
as, for example, game animals. Thus, the soul motives are brought
into interplay with other influences, springing in part from the
emotions associated with the search for daily food, though primarily
with success or failure in the chase. As a result, the soul motives
obviously become less prominent, and the totem animal, freed from this
association, acquires its own peculiar significance, which fluctuates
between the ancestral idea and that of a protective demon. The concern
for food, which was at first operative only as a secondary motive, was
heightened in certain localities where the natural environment was
poor, and, with the influx of immigrant tribes, it assumed ever greater
prominence. In this way, plant totems came to be added to animal
totems; finally, as a result of certain relations of these two totems
to inanimate objects, there arose a fetishistic offshoot of totemism.
This again brought totemism into close connection with ancestor ideas,
and contributed also towards the transition from animal to human
ancestors.
Thus, then, totemic ideas arise as a result of the diremption of
primitive soul ideas into the _corporeal soul_ and the _breath-_ and
_shadow-soul_. That the two latter are associated, is proven also by
the history of totemism. Folk belief, even down to the present, holds
that the soul of the dying person issues in his last breath and that it
possesses the form of an animal. The soul of one who has recently died,
however, appears primarily in dreams and as a phantom form. Now, the
totem animal has its genesis in the transformation of the breath-soul
into an animal. The shadow-soul of the dream, moreover, exercises
an influence on individual totemism, as it does also on conception
totemism and on sex totemism.
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