ABSTRACT
There is another factor of which we must not lose sight—that is, totemism. This arose, according to Salah, from a belief in spirits, and, although agreeing in the main idea with what Professor Robertson Smith has told us, the sequence is reversed, for, whereas Salah thinks that animals were revered because bori used to appear in their form, and that this went on even after the distinction between them had been made, the author of The Religion of the Semites holds that “the jinn, with all their mysterious powers, are mainly nothing else than more or less modernised representatives of animal kinds, clothed with the supernatural attributes inseparable from the savage conception of animate nature. A species of jinn allied by kinship with a tribe of men would be indistinguishable from a totem kind, and instead of calling the jinn gods without worshippers, we may with greater precision speak of them as potential totems without human kinsfolk.” 1
