ines of cleanness and uncleanness no
doubt may have taken their rise in the real or fancied utility of the
prescriptions, but it is probable that the origin of many is indicated
in the curious habit of the Samoans to make fetishes of living animals.
It will be recollected that these people had no "gods made with hands,"
but they substituted animals for them.

At his birth

"every Samoan was supposed to be taken under the care of some tutelary
god or _aitu_ [= Atua] as it was called. The help of perhaps half a
dozen different gods was invoked in succession on the occasion, but the
one who happened to be addressed just as the child was born was marked
and declared to be the child's god for life.

"These gods were supposed to appear in some _visible incarnation,_ and
the particular thing in which his god was in the habit of appearing was,
to the Samoan, an object of veneration. It was in fact his idol, and
he was careful never to injure it or treat it with contempt. One, for
instance, saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the
turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard;
and so on, throughout all the fish of the sea and birds and four-footed
beasts and creeping things. In some of the shell-fish even, gods were
supposed to be present. A man would eat freely of what was regarded as
the incarnation of the god of another man, but the incarnation of his
own particular god he would consider it death to injure or eat." [23]

We have here that which appears to be the origin, or one of the origins,
of food prohibitions, on the one hand, and of totemism on the other.
When it is remembered that the old Israelites sprang from ancestors who
are said to have resided near, or in, one of the great seats of ancient
Babylonian civilisation, the city of Ur; that they had been, it is said
for centuries, in close contact with the Egyptians; and that, in the
theology of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians, there is abundant
evidence, notwithstanding their advanced social organisation, of the
belief in spirits, with sorcery, ancestor-worship, the deification of
animals, and the converse animalisation of gods--it obviously needs very
strong evidence to justify the belief that the rude tribes of Israel did
not share the notions from which their far more civilised neighbours had
not emancipated themselves.

But it is surely needless to carry the comparison further. Out of the
abundant evidence at