Totemism is the name anthropologists gave to a special bond of kinship between a human group, usually a clan, and an animal, plant or other natural species, its totem, which the group takes as its emblem and often may not kill or eat. The word comes from the Ojibwe of North America, in whose language it refers to one’s own kin. For a century anthropologists disagreed over whether totemism was the earliest form of religion, a social system or an illusion; Therapeutic Shamanism does not use the word for a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, though it shares with totemism the sense that a person can be bound in kinship to a whole species.
What is totemism? #
A relationship of kinship between people and a kind of being. In the classic cases a clan has a totem, often an animal species and sometimes a plant or another natural thing, which is its emblem and its relative. Members of the clan may count themselves descended from it, treat it with special respect, and keep rules about it, such as not killing or eating it, or not marrying someone who shares the same totem.1 Some peoples also recognise totems belonging to individuals, especially in Aboriginal Australia and North America.1
The relationship is usually with the whole species, not with one particular animal. Members of a kangaroo clan are related to Kangaroo, not to a kangaroo they once met. A man of the Aranda of Central Australia, then still living largely as hunter-gatherers, was shown a photograph of himself in the 1890s and said it was exactly like him, “as is a kangaroo”, which was his totem.2 See Who is Philippe Descola, and what are his four ways of seeing the world?
Where does the word ‘totem’ come from? #
From the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, of the Great Lakes and the lands west of them, who lived by gathering wild rice, hunting and fishing, with only a few bands growing maize. Their word ototeman means one’s brother-sister kin. A British trader and translator brought the word into English in 1791, misunderstanding it as an individual’s guardian spirit in animal form. The first accurate account came from the Ojibwe Methodist missionary Peter Jones, who died in 1856: the totems belonged to the clans, so that members of a clan were related and might not marry one another.3
So the word began as a kinship term, describing how Ojibwe people were related to one another through their clans, and it was outsiders who turned it into a word for a personal spirit animal. See What is kinship, and why do animists extend it beyond humans?
How did anthropologists use the idea? #
As a key to the origins of religion and society, for about fifty years. John McLennan, in “The Worship of Animals and Plants” (1869 to 1870), proposed that totemism was the earliest stage of religion. The anthropologist James Frazer, in the four volumes of Totemism and Exogamy (1910), saw it instead as a kind of magic. The sociologist Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), treated Australian totemism as the simplest religion of all, and the totem as the emblem of the clan itself. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in Totem and Taboo (1913), tied it to the horror of incest and to guilt.4 See What is a taboo, and why did every people have them? and What are the sacred and the profane?
These theories shared an assumption that the anthropologists Alfred Haddon and Hingston Quiggin were already calling erroneous in 1910: that the religion of ‘savages’ showed the primitive mode of thought out of which ‘civilised’ religions had evolved.5 That ladder of cultures, with hunter-gatherers at the bottom, is one form of the hierarchical thinking Therapeutic Shamanism traces to the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Is totemism real, or an anthropologists’ invention? #
Some anthropologists concluded that it was largely an invention. In 1910 the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser showed that the features usually bundled together as totemism, such as clan emblems, descent from an animal, food rules and marriage rules, turn up separately in different cultures. Franz Boas held in 1916 that it had no single origin, and Robert Lowie in 1920 that the category should be dropped.6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Totemism (1962), called it an illusion. What peoples are doing, he said, is using differences between natural species to think about differences between human groups, so that animals are “good to think” and not only good to eat.7
Others have brought it back. The French anthropologist Philippe Descola treats totemism as one of four basic ways in which humans everywhere identify the beings around them, the one in which a human group and its totem share the same qualities, inner and outer, and finds it most clearly in Aboriginal Australia.2 And for the peoples concerned, clans and their totems were never a theory: among the Ojibwe, who had no overall chiefs, it was marriage between clans that linked the people together.3 See Who is Philippe Descola, and what are his four ways of seeing the world?
How is totemism different from animism? #
In the older anthropology they were two separate ‘stages’ of religion; in Descola’s scheme they are two different ways of identifying other beings. In animism, as Descola describes it, other beings have an inner life like ours but bodies unlike ours; in totemism, a human group and its totem share both.2
In Therapeutic Shamanism, animism is the ground of everything, the experience that the whole world is alive, conscious and kin. A clan’s bond with its totem species is one instance of that kinship, not something set apart from it. See What is animism?
Is a totem the same as a Power Animal? #
No. ‘Totem’ is not used in Therapeutic Shamanism as a name for a Power Animal. The animal helpers, guides and teachers met in journeys are sometimes called animal totems, and a Power Animal is something different, the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this of a wild species, with whom a person chooses a committed, usually lifelong bond.8 The everyday spiritual uses of the word are covered in What are totem spirits, and how do they differ from a Power Animal? The word survives in Therapeutic Shamanism in one other sense, in the chakra teaching sometimes called the totem pole. See What is the energy body, and what are the chakras?
What does totemism share with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
The bond with a whole species. A clan’s totem is a kind of being, not an individual animal, and the relationship with it is one of kinship and respect, often for life and across generations. In Therapeutic Shamanism a Power Animal is likewise not an individual animal. It is Panther and not a panther, the whole of the species held as one being, from which every individual of that species springs.8 The two are not the same thing. A totem belongs to a group and is passed down; a Power Animal is a personal bond, entered into by choice, with a being met in the Lower-World. But both rest on the experience that a human being can be related, as family, to the whole of another kind of being. See What is an Oversoul? and What is a Power Animal?
