The chief literary sources of my studies in this field were the well known works of J. G. Frazer (_Totemism and Exogamy_ and _The Golden Bough_), a mine of valuable facts and opinions. But Frazer effected little towards elucidating the problems of totemism; he had more than once fundamentally altered his views on the subject, and the other ethnologists and prehistorians seemed in equal uncertainty and disagreement. My starting-point was the striking correspondence between the two taboo-injunctions of totemism (not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with any woman of the same totem-clan) and the two elements of the Œdipus complex (killing the father and taking the mother to wife). I was therefore tempted to equate the totem animal with the father; and, in fact, primitive peoples themselves do this explicitly, by honouring it as the forefather of the clan. There next came to my help two facts from psychoanalysis, a lucky observation of a child made by Ferenczi, which made it possible to speak of an “infantile return of totemism,” and the analysis of early animal-phobias in children, which so often showed that the animal was a substitute for the father, a substitute onto which the fear of the father derived from the Œdipus complex had been displaced. Not much was lacking to enable me to recognize the killing of the father as the nucleus of totemism and the starting-point in the formation of religion. This missing element was supplied when I became acquainted with W. Robertson Smith’s work, _The Religion of the Semites_. Its author (a man of genius, who was both a physicist and a biblical expert) introduced the so-called totem-feast as an essential part of the totemistic religion. Once a year the totem animal, which was at other times regarded as sacred, was solemnly killed in the presence of all the members of the clan, was devoured and was then mourned over. The mourning was followed by a great festival. When I further took into account Darwin’s conjecture that men originally lived in hordes, each under the domination of a single, powerful, violent and jealous male, there rose before me, out of all these components, the following hypothesis, or, I would rather say, vision. The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy, but also their ideal. After the deed, they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of failure and regret, they learned to come to an agreement among themselves, they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forego the possession of the