take the form of this or that animal or plant,
and this procedure, it has been supposed, would found a totemic
family--his descendants would revere the object in question as the
embodiment of the spirit of the ancestor, would take its name, and, when
it was edible, would refrain from eating it.[901] It is true that the
belief was, and is, not uncommon among savages that a deceased person
might take the form of some natural object; but the reported cases are
rare in which a man deliberately enjoins on his descendants reverence
for such an object with the result that a quasi-totemic group
arises.[902] This custom is not frequent enough to account for totemism.

+546+. A theory suggested by the fact that many clans perform magical
ceremonies (for the purpose of increasing the supply of food) is that,
when the magical apparatus of some body of persons consisted of parts of
an animal, the animal would become sacred, a magical society might be
formed by an individual magician, and thus a totemic magic-working clan
might be created. For this hypothesis there is no support except in the
fact that changes in clan life are sometimes brought about by the old
men; but such changes are modifications of existing usages, not new
creations. The power of a savage man of genius may be admitted, but to
account for the known totemic communities we should have to suppose a
vast number of such men, in different parts of the world, all working in
the same direction and reaching substantially the same results.

+547+. The belief that a man might deposit his soul in an animal or a
plant or some other object is found in West Africa, North America, and
probably elsewhere. As such objects would, as a rule, not be killed
(and every individual of a group would be thus respected), it has been
supposed that, when various persons deposited their souls in the same
object, a totemic body would come into existence.[903] This view would
account for totemic reverence and for the sense of kinship, but the
objection to it is that in most totemic organizations the belief in
question has not been certified.

+548+. The "conceptional" theory refers the origin of totemism to the
belief, found among certain peoples, that conception is produced by the
entrance into the mother's womb of some object (animal, plant, or other)
with which the child is identified.[904] In Central Australia it is held
that what passes into the woman is a spirit child which has a certain