begun to change
into a proper personal name for the totem, as 'Ceres' or
'Chicomecoatl' or 'Xilonen' have changed into proper names of personal
deities. Whether we are or are not to regard the totem as a god, at
any rate, viewed as a being in the process of acquiring individuality,
he seems to be acquiring it in the same way, and by the same process,
as corn-goddesses and maize-mothers acquired theirs, and to present to
our eyes a stage of growth through which these vegetation-deities
themselves have passed. They also at one time had not yet acquired
the personal names by which they afterwards came to be addressed. They
were, though nameless, the beings present in any and every sheaf of
corn or maize, though not cabined and confined to any one sheaf or any
number of sheaves. And these beings have it in them to become--for
they did become--deities. The process by which and the period at which
they may have become deities we have already suggested: the period is
the stage at which offerings, originally made at irregular times of
distress, become annual offerings, made at the time of harvest; the
process is the process by which what is customary becomes obligatory.
The offerings at harvest time, from customary, become obligatory. That
which is offered, is thereby sacred; the very intention to offer it,
this year in the same way as it was offered last year, suffices to
make it sacred, before it is offered. Thus, the whole species, whether
plant or animal, becomes sacred, to the deity to whom it is offered:
it is his. And if he be as vague and shadowy as the power or being to
whom the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur make their offerings at
stated seasons, then he may be looked for and found in the plant or
animal species which is his. The harvest is his alone, until the
first-fruits are offered. He makes the plants to grow: if they fail,
it is to him the community prays. If they thrive, it is because he is,
though not identical with them, yet in a way present in them, and is
not to be distinguished from the being who not only manifests himself
in every individual plant or animal of the species, though not
identical with any one, but is called by the name of the species.

Whether we are to see in totems, as they occur in Australia, beings in
the stage through which vegetation deities presumably passed, before
they became corn-goddesses and mothers of the maize, is a question,
the answer to which depends upon our interpretatio