Totem, a natural object, not an individual, but one of a class, taken by a tribe, a family, or a single person, and treated with superstitious respect as an outward symbol of an existing intimate unseen relation. The Algonquin word is otem, which must always be preceded by the personal article, as kit-otem = the family-mark, nind-otem = my family-mark. Other dialects have different names, as the Iroquois ohtara. The wide distribution of Totemism among the nations of the Old World, civilised as well as savage, and its significance as at once a religious and a social system, was first pointed out by Mr J. F. McLennan in the article TOTEMISM in the first edition of this work (1868) and in a series of articles in the Fort. Rev. (Oct. and Nov. 1869 and Feb. 1870); the richest collection of data yet made is Mr J. G. Frazer's Totemism (Edin. 1887).
The totem is considered as helpful to the man, who in his turn abstains from killing it if an animal, or eating it if a plant, and who often assimilates himself to it by wearing its skin or the like, or tattooing its picture on his body. The whole mem- bers of the clan who have a totem in common count themselves of one blood, and claim the totem as their common ancestor. The restriction upon killing and eating it is absolute, and sometimes men are tabooed from touching or even looking at it under pain of death or expulsion from the tribe. Elaborate ceremonies connected with birth, marriage, and death point more closely to the identification of the man and the totem, and such ceremonies as those of the Australians at puberty are intended to initiate the youth into the restrictions that must be observed in sexual commerce. In Australia also we find special sex-totems, which it is forbidden the opposite sex to kill; and among the North American Indians special personal totems—manitous—which are usually revealed after the exhumation of the long fast at puberty. Totemism thus forms the foundation of a vast social system of alternate obligation and restriction. It governs marriage and all sexual relations, for a man may not touch a woman of the same totem as himself. Sometimes the prohibition only extends to a man's own totem clan, but more frequently it includes several clans, in none of which is it allowed to marry. Such an exogamous group of clans within the tribe is a phratry, which was no doubt originally itself a totem clan that had since undergone subdivision. In Australia we find not infrequently a tribe divided into two phratries, each including a number of totem clans; sometimes sub-phratries again come between the phratries and the clans, still further by vexatious restrictions curtailing the liberty of marriage. But the allowable range of kinship may stretch over a thousand miles, and the native by no means needs spoken language to discover the women with whom he may have commerce, for the totem marks upon their bodies give him the plain indication of duty. For the significance of Totemism in rudimentary religion, see ANCESTORS (WORSHIP OF) and ANIMALS (WORSHIP OF); and for its importance on the social side, in laws of descent, whether through the male or female line, and in marriage, see FAMILY and MARRIAGE.
Mr J. F. McLennan, in his inquiry into the origin of Exogamy, concluded that it was based on an antecedent system of Totemism, evidence of which was generally found in all rude societies acknowledging kinship through women only, the same association being found almost as generally in those rude societies which know kinship through males, while the worship of plants and animals in more advanced societies acknowledging kinship through males was lineally descended from Totemism. Mr Donald McLennan (preface to The Patriarchal Theory, 1885) tells us that his brother had come to abandon his original theory as to the origin of Totemism, and that, in the final constructive work to have been completed had he lived, his aim was to have been rather to show its prevalence, to establish some leading points in its history, to exhibit it in connection with kinship and with Exogamy, and to make out its connection with worship. He tells us, further, that the general conclusion appeared to his brother to be that it was possible to demonstrate that, Totemism preceding Exogamy, the latter must have arisen in societies acknowledging no kinship save through women; that all other facts bearing on rude society may be interpreted as evidence of a gradual progress from the condition of which Totemism and female kinship are the mark; and that thus it was possible to exhibit the history of human society as that of an evolution moving with very various rapidity among different populations, but always beginning with a condition in which the idea of incest did not exist, and always tending upwards from that condition. Whether or not this lowest step in the argument may be accepted—and grave objections enough will be found conveniently grouped in chap. xiv. of Westermarck's History of Human Marriage (1891)—the want of Mr McLennan's book is a loss to the science of Sociology that will not soon be made good.