There is thus nothing to bar the conjecture that the exogamous
gotras of the whole Brahmans were once a form of totem-kindred,
which (like aspiring non-Aryan stocks at the present day) dropped the
totem-name and renamed the septs from some eponymous hero, medicine-man,
or Rishi.

Constant repetition of the same set of facts becomes irksome, and yet
is made necessary by the legitimate demand for trustworthy and abundant
evidence. As the reader must already have reflected, this living
mythical belief in the common confused equality of men, gods, plants,
beasts, rivers, and what not, which still regulates savage society,(1)
is one of the most prominent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked
and exactly described it among the Egyptians--"common and akin to men
and gods they believed the beasts to be."(2) The belief in such equality
is alien to modern civilisation. We have shown that it is common and
fundamental in savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, we might quote
Turner,(3) and for Melanesia, Codrington,(4) while for New Zealand we
have Taylor.(5) For the Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern
Asia, we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: "Each tribe of
these people look upon some particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan,
goose, raven, etc., and such is not eaten by that tribe" though the
others may eat it.(6) As the majority of our witnesses were quite
unaware that the facts they described were common among races of whom
many of them had never even heard, their evidence may surely be accepted
as valid, especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves in
marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from food, on pillars
over graves, in rude heraldry, and in other obvious and palpable
shapes. If we have not made out, by the evidence of institutions, that
a confused credulity concerning the equality and kinship of man and the
objects in nature is actually a ruling belief among savages, and even
higher races, from the Lena to the Amazon, from the Gold Coast to
Queensland, we may despair of ever convincing an opponent. The survival
of the same beliefs and institutions among civilised races, Aryan and
others, will later be demonstrated.(7) If we find that the mythology of
civilised races here agrees with the actual practical belief of savages,
and if we also find that civilised races retain survivals of the
institutions in which the belief is expressed by savages, then we may
surely infer