them
perforce--and they are not divorced from totemic relations. The real
voluntary society is of a quite different character. In general, in its
most developed form, it ignores differences of age, sex, and clan. There
are, however, diversities in the constitution of the various
organizations that may be called voluntary;[881] conditions of
membership and functions vary.

+531+. Such organizations are of two sorts, one mainly political or
governmental, the other mainly religious. The best examples of the first
sort are found in Melanesia, Polynesia, and West Africa. The clan
government by the old men, of which a simple form exists in Central
Australia, has passed into, or is represented by, a society of men that
undertakes to maintain order, exact contributions, and provide
amusements for the people. The Dukduk of the Bismarck Archipelago,[882]
the Egbo of Old Calabar, and the Ogboni of Yoruba,[883] to take
prominent examples, are police associations that have managed to get
complete control of their respective communities and have naturally
become instruments of oppression and fraud. They have elaborate
ceremonies of initiation, are terrible to women and uninitiated males,
and religion usually enters only casually and subordinately into their
activities, chiefly in the form of magical ceremonies. A partial
exception, in regard to this last point, occurs in the case of the Areoi
society of Tahiti, which, as it is the best-organized society in
Polynesia, is also the most tyrannical, and the broadest in its scope;
its members enjoy not only a large share of the good things of this
life, but also the most desirable positions in the future life.[884]

+532+. On the other hand, the North American voluntary societies are
mainly concerned with the presentation of religious ideas by the
dramatization of myths, and by demanding for membership some sort of
religious experience. How far such societies existed in the Eastern
tribes it is not possible to say. Among these tribes, as among the Skidi
Pawnee, the Navahos, and other groups of the Middle West, the control of
religion has largely passed into the hands of priests--an advance in
religious organization. Where ceremonies are conducted by societies,
membership in these is often conditioned on the adoption of a personal
divine patron by every member.

+533+. This adoption of a _guardian spirit_ by the individual is the
most definite early divergence from the totemistic clan o