ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the common occurrence, among all lower races of mankind, of ideas about animals which, under certain circumstances, might develop into full totemism. This social and religious system is founded above all on the belief in a close relationship between men and animals, which, in its turn, gives rise easily to the belief in the reincarnation of human souls in animal beings. Among the few tribes in South America which seem to have a fully developed totemic system are the Goajiros in Colombia and the Arawaks in Guiana. The idea of the Otomacs and some other Indians that “after death the body or skeleton itself is turned into stone, and so reverts to the very material from which some of them believed it to have originally sprung” is interesting. It reveals a primitive mode of thought which lies also at the bottom of totemism.
