Freud - Complete Works (465 page)

   But why is this binding force
attributed to eating and drinking together? In primitive societies
there was only one kind of bond which was absolute and inviolable -
that of kinship. The solidarity of such a fellowship was complete.
‘A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up
together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could
be treated as parts of one common life. . . . In a
case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, "The blood of
M. or N. has been spilt", naming the man; they say, "Our
blood has been spilt". In Hebrew the phrase by which one
claims kinship is "I am your bone and your flesh".’
Thus kinship implies participation in a common substance. It is
therefore natural that it is not merely based on the fact that a
man is a part of his mother’s substance, having been born of
her and having been nourished by her milk, but that it can be
acquired and strengthened by food which a man eats later and with
which his body is renewed. If a man shared a meal with his god he
was expressing a conviction that they were of one substance; and he
would never share a meal with one whom he regarded as a
stranger.

   The sacrificial meal, then, was
originally a feast of kinsmen, in accordance with the law that only
kinsmen eat together. In our own society the members of a family
have their meals in common; but the sacrificial meal bears no
relation to the family. Kinship is an older thing than family life,
and in the most primitive societies known to us the family
contained members of more than one kindred. The man married a woman
of another clan and the children inherited their mother’s
clan; so that there was no communion of kin between the man and the
other members of the family. In a family of such a kind there was
no common meal. To this day, savages eat apart and alone and the
religious food prohibitions of totemism often make it impossible
for them to eat in common with their wives and children.

Totem And Taboo

2776

   Let us now turn to the
sacrificial animal. As we have heard, there is no gathering of a
clan without an animal sacrifice, nor - and this now becomes
significant - any slaughter of an animal except upon these
ceremonial occasions. While game and the milk of domestic animals
might be consumed without any qualms, religious scruples made it
impossible to kill a domestic animal for private purposes. There
cannot be the slightest doubt, says Robertson Smith, that the
slaughter of a victim was originally among the acts which
‘
are illegal to an individual, and can only be justified
when the whole clan shares the responsibility of the
deed
.’¹ So far as I know, there is only one class of
actions recognized by early nations to which this description
applies, viz. actions which involve an invasion of the sanctity of
the tribal blood. In fact, a life which no single tribesman is
allowed to invade, and which can be sacrificed only by the consent
and common action of the kin, stands on the same footing with the
life of the fellow-tribesman.’ The rule that every
participant at the sacrificial meal must eat a share of the flesh
of the victim has the same meaning as the provision that the
execution of a guilty tribesman must be carried out by the tribe as
a whole. In other words, the sacrificial animal was treated as a
member of the tribe;
the sacrificing community, the god and the
sacrificial animal were of the same blood and members of one
clan
.

   Robertson Smith brings forward
copious evidence for identifying the sacrificial animal with the
primitive totem animal. In later antiquity there were two classes
of sacrifice: one in which the victims were domestic animals of the
kinds habitually used for eating, and the other extraordinary
sacrifices of animals which were unclean and whose consumption was
forbidden. Investigation shows that these unclean animals were
sacred animals, that they were offered as sacrifices to the gods to
whom they were sacred, that originally they were identical with the
gods themselves, and that by means of the sacrifice the worshippers
in some way laid stress upon their blood kinship with the animal
and the god. But in still earlier times this distinction between
ordinary and ‘mystic’ sacrifices disappears. Originally
all
animals were sacred, their flesh was forbidden meat and
might only be consumed on ceremonial occasions and with the
participation of the whole clan. The slaughter of an animal was
equivalent to a shedding of the tribal blood and could occur
subject only to the same precautions and the same insurances
against incurring reproach.

  
¹
[This sentence is italicized by
Freud.]

Totem And Taboo

2777

   The domestication of animals and
the introduction of cattle-breeding seems everywhere to have
brought to an end the strict and unadulterated totemism of
primaeval days.¹ But such sacred character as remained to
domestic animals under what had then become ‘pastoral’
religion is obvious enough to allow us to infer its original
totemic nature. Even in late classical times ritual prescribed in
many places that the sacrificial priest must take to flight after
performing the sacrifice, as though to escape retribution. The idea
that slaughtering oxen was a crime must at one time have prevailed
generally in Greece. At the Athenian festival of Buphonia a regular
trial was instituted after the sacrifice, and all the participants
were called as witnesses. At the end of it, it was agreed that the
responsibility for the murder should be placed upon the knife; and
this was accordingly cast into the sea.

   In spite of the ban protecting
the lives of sacred animals in their quality of fellow-clansmen, a
necessity arose for killing one of them from time to time in solemn
communion and for dividing its flesh and blood among the members of
the clan. The compelling motive for this deed reveals the deepest
meaning of the nature of sacrifice. We have heard how in later
times, whenever food is eaten in common, the participation in the
same substance establishes a sacred bond between those who consume
it when it has entered their bodies. In ancient times this result
seems only to have been effected by participation in the substance
of a
sacrosanct
victim.
The holy mystery of sacrificial
death ‘is justified by the consideration that only in this
way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive
a living bond of union between the worshippers and their
god
’.²(Ibid., 313.)

   This bond is nothing else than
the life of the sacrificial animal, which resides in its flesh and
in its blood and is distributed among all the participants in the
sacrificial meal. A notion of this kind lies at the root of all the
blood covenants by which men made compacts with each other even at
a late period of history. This completely literal way of regarding
blood-kinship as identity of substance makes it easy to understand
the necessity for renewing it from time to time by the physical
process of the sacrificial meal.

  
¹
‘The inference is that the
domestication to which totemism inevitably leads (when there are
any animals capable of domestication) is fatal to totemism.’
(Jevons, 1902, 120.)

  
²
[This sentence is italicized by
Freud.]

Totem And Taboo

2778

   At this point I will interrupt my
survey of Robertson Smith’s line of thought and restate the
gist of it in the most concise terms. With the establishment of the
idea of private property sacrifice came to be looked upon as a gift
to the deity, as a transference of property from men to the god.
But this interpretation left unexplained all the peculiarities of
the ritual of sacrifice. In the earliest times the sacrificial
animal had itself been sacred and its life untouchable; it might
only be killed if all the members of the clan participated in the
deed and shared their guilt in the presence of the god, so that the
sacred substance could be yielded up and consumed by the clansmen
and thus ensure their identity with one another and with the deity.
The sacrifice was a sacrament and the sacrificial animal was itself
a member of the clan. It was in fact the ancient totem animal, the
primitive god himself, by the killing and consuming of which the
clans men renewed and assured their likeness to the god.

   From this analysis of the nature
of sacrifice Robertson Smith draws the conclusion that the periodic
killing and eating of the totem in times
before the worship of
anthropomorphic deities
had been an important element in
totemic religion. The ceremonial of a totem meal of this kind is,
he suggests, to be found in a description of a sacrifice of
comparatively late date. St. Nilus records a sacrificial ritual
current among the Bedouin of the Sinai Desert at the end of the
fourth century A.D. The victim of the sacrifice, a camel, ‘is
bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the
leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar
in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the
first wound . . . and in all haste drinks of the
blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the
victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh
and devouring them raw with such wild haste, that in the short
interval between the rise of the day star¹ which marked the
hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays
before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin,
blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.’ All the evidence
goes to show that this barbaric ritual, which bears every sign of
extreme antiquity, was no isolated instance but was everywhere the
original form taken by totemic sacrifice, though later toned down
in many different directions.

  
¹
To which the sacrifice was
offered.

Totem And Taboo

2779

   Many authorities have refused to
attach importance to the concept of the totem meal, because it was
not supported by any direct observation at the level of totemism.
Robertson Smith himself pointed to instances in which the
sacramental significance of the sacrifice seemed to be assured: for
instance, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, and others which
recall the circumstances of the totem meal - the sacrifice of bears
by the Bear clan of the Ouataouak tribe in America and the bear
feast of the Aino in Japan. These and similar cases have been
reported in detail by Frazer in the Fifth Part of his great work
(1912,
2
). An American Indian tribe in California, which
worship a large bird of prey (a buzzard), kill it once a year at a
solemn festival, after which it is mourned and its skin and
feathers are preserved. The Zuni Indians of New Mexico behave in a
similar way to their sacred turtles.

   A feature has been observed in
the
intichiuma
ceremonies of the Central Australian tribes
which agrees admirably with Robertson Smith’s conjectures.
Each clan, when it is performing magic for the multiplication of
its totem (which it itself is normally prohibited from consuming),
is obliged during the ceremony to eat a small portion of its own
totem before making it accessible to the other clans. According to
Frazer (ibid.,
2
, 590) the clearest example of a sacramental
consumption of an otherwise prohibited totem is to be found among
the Bini of West Africa in connection with their funeral
ceremonies.

   Accordingly, I propose that we
should adopt Robertson Smith’s hypothesis that the
sacramental killing and communal eating of the totem animal, whose
consumption was forbidden on all other occasions, was an important
feature of totemic religion.¹

  
¹
I am not unaware of the objections to this
theory of sacrifice which have been brought forward by various
writers (such as Marillier, Hubert and Mauss, etc.); but they have
not diminished to any important extent the impression produced by
Robertson Smith’s hypothesis.

Totem And Taboo

2780

(5)

   Let us call up the spectacle of a
totem meal of the kind we have been discussing, amplified by a few
probable features which we have not yet been able to consider. The
clan is celebrating the ceremonial occasion by the cruel slaughter
of its totem animal and is devouring it raw - blood, flesh and
bones. The clansmen are there, dressed in the likeness of the totem
and imitating it in sound and movement, as though they are seeking
to stress their identity with it. Each man is conscious that he is
performing an act forbidden to the individual and justifiable only
through the participation of the whole clan; nor may any one absent
himself from the killing and the meal. When the deed is done, the
slaughtered animal is lamented and bewailed. The mourning is
obligatory, imposed by dread of a threatened retribution. As
Robertson Smith (1894, 412) remarks of an analogous occasion, its
chief purpose is to disclaim responsibility for the killing.

   But the mourning is followed by
demonstrations of festive rejoicing: every instinct is unfettered
and there is licence for every kind of gratification. Here we have
easy access to an understanding of the nature of festivals in
general. A festival is a permitted, or rather an obligatory,
excess, a solemn breach of a prohibition. It is not that men commit
the excesses because they are feeling happy as a result of some
injunction they have received. It is rather that excess is of the
essence of a festival; the festive feeling is produced by the
liberty to do what is as a rule prohibited.