Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IVToy, Crawford Howell
HistoryHistory
Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV
Toy, Crawford Howell
Mythology; Religion -- History; Religions -- History; Rites and ceremonies
+487+. _India._ The non-Aryan peoples of India are divided into a large
number of exogamous clans, each with its sacred object, which it is
unlawful to injure or use.[839] A departure from ordinary totemic usage
appears in the fact that in many cases the sacred objects receive
worship. The social constitution of these peoples seems to have
undergone modifications, partly through adoption of agriculture (which
has occurred generally), partly by direct Hindu religious influence; the
history of the non-Aryans, however, is obscure in many points. The
Aryans of India have exogamy but not totemism, and this is true in part
of the Assamese. Totemism has not been observed in Burma[840] and China,
or in the Malay Peninsula.
+488+. _North America._ The North American native tribes, scattered over
a large territory, with widely different climatic and topographical
features, and themselves divided into half a dozen linguistic stocks,
show great diversities of social organization. While exogamous groups
(clans, phratries, and local groups) are found almost everywhere, there
is little precise information about certain fundamental points of
totemic systems, particularly customs of killing and eating the totem
and belief in descent from it. With a general apparatus that often
suggests an original totemism, the American social type differs
considerably from the Australian, resembling in some respects the
Melanesian and the Polynesian, but with peculiarities that difference it
from these. Among the Eskimo and the Californians no definite signs of
totemism have been discovered. Among the other peoples the Rocky
Mountain range makes a line of demarcation--the tribes of the Pacific
Coast differ in organization decidedly not only from their eastern
neighbors but also from all other known savage and half-civilized
peoples. There are points of similarity to these, but the general
Pacific Coast type is unique.
+489+. Beginning with the _Eastern_ tribes, we find that the Iroquois
and their allies (Mohawks, Senecas, and others),[841] mainly
agricultural, had the tribe or the phratry rather than the clan as their
political and religious unit. The Iroquois League, organized by the
great statesman Hiawatha in the fifteenth century, was a federal union
of five (later of six) tribes that showed remarkable political wisdom
and skill. The great festivals were tribal. The clan is recognized in a
myth that describes the metamorphosis of a turtle into a man who became
the progenitor of the clan of that name, and it was socially influential
by reason of the brotherhood that existed among members of clans having
the same name in different tribes, and through the fact that a man's
personal name was the property of the clan. The totem figure was used as
a badge. Whether or not the totem was killed and eaten is not known. In
the form, then, in which it is known, the Iroquois organization cannot
be called totemic--whether it was originally such must be left
undetermined.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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