Frazer, Robertson Smith, and myself are accessible, and contain our definitions.  He does not produce these definitions, and criticise them; he produces Dr. Lippert’s and criticises that.  An argument should be met in its strongest and most authoritative form.  ’Define what you mean by a totem,’ says Professor Max Muller in his Gifford Lectures of 1891 (p. 123).  He had to look no further for a definition, an authoritative definition, than to ‘totem’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or to McLennan.  Yet his large and intelligent Glasgow audience, and his readers, may very well be under the impression that a definition of ‘totem’ is ‘still to seek,’ like Prince Charlie’s religion.  Controversy simply cannot be profitably conducted on these terms.

’The best representatives of anthropology are now engaged not so much in comparing as in discriminating.’ {79} Why not refer, then, to the results of their discriminating efforts?  ’To treat all animal worship as due to totemism is a mistake.’  Do we make it?

Mr. Frazer and Myself

There is, or was, a difference of opinion between Mr. Frazer and myself as to the causes of the appearance of certain sacred animals in Greek religion.  My notions were published in Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887), Mr. Frazer’s in The Golden Bough (1890).  Necessarily I was unaware in 1887 of Mr. Frazer’s still unpublished theory.  Now that I have read it, he seems to me to have the better logic on his side; and if I do not as yet wholly agree with him, it is because I am not yet certain that both of our theories may not have their proper place in Greek mythology.

Greek Totemism

In C. and M. (p. 106) I describe the social aspects of totemism.  I ask if there are traces of it in Greece.  Suppose, for argument’s sake, that in prehistoric Greece the mouse had been a totem, as it is among the Oraons of Bengal. {80} In that case (1) places might be named from a mouse tribe; (2) mice might be held sacred per se; (3) the mouse name might be given locally to a god who superseded the mouse in pride of place; (4) images of the mouse might be associated with that of the god, (5) and used as a local badge or mark; (6) myths might be invented to explain the forgotten cause of this prominence of the mouse.  If all these notes occur, they would raise a presumption in favour of totemism in the past of Greece.  I then give evidence in detail, proving that all these six facts do occur among Greeks of the Troads and sporadically elsewhere.  I add that, granting for the sake of argument that these traces may point to totemism in the remote past, the mouse, though originally a totem, ‘need not have been an Aryan totem’ (p. 116).