"Totem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tale of Ji-shib the Chippewa, and A-mi-kons the (p. 112) little beaver, his totem, follows Indian life from birth to early manhood. Dr. Jenks has ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... individuality and of full personality it is which characterises totems. The totem, also, is a being who, if he manifests himself in this particular animal, which is slain, has also manifested himself and will manifest himself in other animals of the same species: but he is not identical with any particular ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... for the divergence of drawing and ornament is doubtless the original motive of ornamentation, which is found in the clan or totem ideas. Either to invoke protection or to mark ownership, the totem symbol appears on all instruments and utensils; it has been shown, indeed, that practically all primitive ornament is based on totemic motives.[12] Now, since a very slight suggestion of the totem given by its recognized symbol ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... up from the bottom, and, rising to the surface, escaped in hissing gas. A thin vapour arose, and, gradually dissolving, displayed to the eyes of the trembling murderer the figure of an aged Indian, whose long, snowy hair and venerable beard, blown aside from his breast, discovered the well-known totem of the great Wankanaga, the father of the Comanche ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... The girl looked troubled; M'zangwe had guessed right. "But what's all the excitement about the dog? What is it, the sacred totem-animal of the Uller Company?" ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... G. Frazer, in the Fortnightly Review, gives the following description of the totem: "A totem is a class of natural phenomena or material objects—most commonly a species of animals or plants—between which and himself the savage believes that a certain intimate relation exists.... This relation ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... the elaborate and wonderful wood carvings—wonderful, surely, considering who did them wonderful in design and particularly in execution, for they were done with admirable sharpness and exactness, and yet with no better tools than flint and jade and shell could furnish; and the totem-posts were there, ancestor above ancestor, with tongues protruded and hands clasped comfortably over bellies containing other people's ancestors—grotesque and ugly devils, every one, but lovingly carved, and ably; and the stuffed natives were present, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... brothers," said he, swallowing again the lump that rose in his throat; "they belong to the same totem; they are Shawanoes; the Great Spirit would frown to see them ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... follow the above rules, yet in certain cases Murri can marry Butha, and Kubbi may take Ippatha as his spouse— a similar liberty being allowed the men of phratry B. Again, where there is no objection arising from nearness of kin, a Murri man may marry a Matha woman, but her totem must be different from his, and she must belong to a distant family. This applies to the men of every section. By the strict letters of the foregoing table, it would appear that the child of a brother can marry the child of a sister, but this is rigorously forbidden—the table being ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... (d) leather string to tie under the chin; (e) the buttons, conchas or side ornaments of shells, silver, horn or wooden discs, even small mirrors and circles of beadwork were used, and sometimes the conchas were left out altogether; they may have the owner's totem on them, usually a bunch of ermine tails hung from each side of the bonnet just below the concha. A bunch of horsehair will answer as well; (hh) the holes in the leather for holding the lace of the feather; 24 feathers are needed for the full bonnet, without ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... subscription editions, and the sagacities of women. If he should complain that there is no honor and fine living in all of this, we shall have to agree with him. But we can answer that by guile we have preserved our joys, and cleared our way out from the shadows of his big totem pole. If we have but little magnificence, we have as much as anybody can ever have who is hounded by the legal virtues. And if we may keep a little gaiety for life, by that much do we make him bite the dust. It ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... night,' I says. 'Let them call Killisnoo down out of the sky whither I have sent her.' But the priests knew their limits. 'May your klooches bear you sons as the spawn of the salmon,' I says, turning to go; 'and may your totem pole stand long in the land, and the smoke of ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... out receipts, for the supplies as taken. These receipts were pieces of bark, pictured with the kind of supplies taken, and signed with the figure of an otter—the totem of the Ottawas. After the war every receipt was ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... conventionalized head of a wolf. The ears rose weirdly from the gable edge of the roof. Two monster eyes glared through the twilight above a grinning, squared mouth twenty feet across. On either side of the oval door stood a totem, hollow at the base and containing the ashes of long-dead chiefs. The corner-posts were carved into life-size grotesque figures ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... incest barrier probably belongs to the historical acquisitions of humanity and like other moral taboos it must be fixed in many individuals through organic heredity. (Cf. my work, Totem and Taboo, 1913.) Psychoanalytic studies show, however, how intensively the individual struggles with the incest temptations during his development and how frequently he puts them into phantasies and ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... morality is preached to-day than was preached by Christ, by Buddha, by Socrates and Plato, by Confucius and whoever was the author of the "Mahabharata"? Good Lord, fifty thousand years ago, in our totem-families, our women were cleaner, our family and group relations ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... we Indians think it very tiresome, especially as one considers the material side of the work—the pigment, the brush, the canvas! There is no mystery there; you know all about them! Worst of all is the commercialization of art. The rudely carved totem pole may appear grotesque to the white man, but it is the sincere expression of the faith and personality of the Indian craftsman, and has never been sold or bartered until it ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... Fox, and finally the Black Fox. But as they had about exhausted the color roster of the fox family, the chances were that the next patrol would have to start on a new line when casting about for a name that would stamp their identity, and serve as a totem. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... monstrosis mulieribus et canibus monstrosa narratio. Forsam totem videri allegorica allusio possit ad Canibales de quibus Petrus [1] Martyr Mediolan de rebus Occatucis. [Footnote 1: Born at Florence in 1500, he entered the church very young, but the reading of the works of Zwingler ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... understand that which lay at the back of Keeko's eyes. She could not read the words on the totem. She did not know their meaning when she heard them. All she knew was that the white man ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... dread with which they regard the menstrual period of women. During such a time, a woman is kept entirely away from the camp, half a mile at least. A woman in such a condition has boughs of some tree of her totem tied round her loins, and is constantly watched and guarded, for it is thought that should any male be so unfortunate as to see a woman in such a condition, he would die. If such a woman were to let herself be seen by a man, she would probably be put to death. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... installation, the council women invest him with an elaborately ornamented tunic, place upon his head a chaplet of feathers, and paint the gentile totem on his face. The sachem of the tribe then announces to the people that the man has been made chief of the gens, and admitted to the council. This is also followed by ...
— Wyandot Government: A Short Study of Tribal Society - Bureau of American Ethnology • John Wesley Powell
... from fly—"] and their mother, Meethetaske.[Footnote: "A turtle laying her eggs in the sand."] But with Onoah it was very different. With him the past was as much of a mystery as the future. No Indian could say even of what tribe he was born. The totem that he bore on his person belonged to no people then existing on the continent, and all connected with him, his history, nation, and ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... off for bear. The fat boy frightened by a totem pole. In a place of many mysteries. Tad makes a great find. A discovery ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... Singing thanks to the Great Spirit, Singing praises to their saviors, Giant Albatross and Beaver, Resting then, within the harbor. Then again, in voice of thunder, Spoke the Spirit from the Heavens; 'Let the Totem of the Tamals Be the Albatross and Beaver; Search and Labor, be their motto; And, lest children of their children May forget their mighty saviors, Giant Albatross and Beaver Shall be changed to rocky Islands— Monuments to stand forever, In ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... had been strong warriors in the Chis-chis-chash; his father's shirt and leggins were black at the seams with the hair of other tribes. He, too, had stolen ponies, but had done no better than that thus far, while he burned to keep the wolf-totem red with honor. Only last night, a few of his boy companions, some even younger than himself, had gone away to the Absaroke for glory and scalps, and ponies and women—a war-party—the one thing ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... from the hut that he had left. They seemed to feel the heat more than Brown did, as they fell in line before Brown's sword. There was no flag, and no flag-pole in that nameless health-resort, so the sword, without its scabbard, was doing duty, point downward in the ground, as a totem-pole of Empire. Brown had stuck it there, like Boanerges' boots, and there it stayed from sunrise until sunset, to be displaced by whoever dared to do it, at ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... scarifying the body are varieties of one general custom, and little stress can be laid on Pictish tattooing as indicating a racial difference. Its purpose may have been ornamental, or possibly to impart an aspect of fierceness, or the figures may have been totem marks, as they are elsewhere. Finally, the description of the Caledonii, a Pictish people, possessing flaming hair and mighty limbs, shows that they differed from the ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... by the gens was, in the Indian dialect, the totem of the clan. This organization and custom we find running all through the Indian tribes. In many tribes the Indians were wont to carve a figure of their totem on a piece of slate, or even to carve a stone in the shape of the totem, which carved or sculptured ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... the white chief," replied the savage, softly, "but he wears only one totem, and that is one which cannot be ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... obvious to the mythopoeic mind that men may become wolves, at least after death. And to the uncivilized thinker this inference is strengthened, as Mr. Spencer has shown, by evidence registered on his own tribal totem or heraldic emblem. The bears and lions and leopards of heraldry are the degenerate descendants of the totem of savagery which designated the tribe by a beast-symbol. To the untutored mind there is everything in a name; ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... of the river Shatt-el-Hai protected it on the south, and supplied the village of Nina with water; no trace of an inclosing wall has been found, and the temples and palaces seem to have served as refuges in case of attack. It had as its arms, or totem, a double-headed eagle standing on a lion passant, or on two demi-lions placed back to back. Its chief god was called Ningirsu, that is, the lord of Girsu, where his temple stood: his companion Bau, and his associates Ninagal, Innanna and Ninsia, were the deities of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... distrust. Still others patronized us. A very few overlooked our faded flannel shirts, our soiled trousers, our floppy old hats with their rattlesnake bands, the wear and tear of our equipment, to respond to us heartily. Them in return we generally perceived to belong to our totem. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... On top of the wagon knelt the symbolic figure of "Enterprise," with a white boy on one side and a colored boy on the other, "Heroes of Tomorrow." On the other side of the wagon stood typical figures, the French-Canadian trapper, the Alaska woman, bearing totem poles on her back, the American of Latin descent on his horse, bearing a standard, a German, an Italian, an American of English descent, a squaw with a papoose, and an Indian chief on his pony. The wagon was modelled on top of the arch. It was too large and bulky to be easily ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... facility in carving wood and stone, a similarity of angular designs on their pottery and basketry, and of artistic representations connected with their common religious or mythological ideas. Many singular forms of carvings and the method of superimposing figures of animals one upon another in their totem poles are found from Alaska to Panama, except in California. These distinguishing features of an incipient culture are found nowhere else in North America, even sporadically. Dall therefore concludes that "they have been impressed upon the American aboriginal ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... in France; not long ago a French scholar published a book on the ensigns of the Roman army,[23] which originally represented certain animals, and using Dr. Frazer's early work on totemism with a very imperfect knowledge of the subject, tried to prove that these were originally totem signs. Roman names of families and old Italian tribe-names are still often quoted as totemistic; but the Fabii and Caepiones, named after cultivated plants, and the Picentes and Hirpini, after woodpecker and wolf, though tempting to ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... bodies of men came to regard themselves as being in special alliance with some one animal, and as being descended from that animal as their common ancestor. The existence side by side of various tribes, each with its definite totem, has not yet been fully proved for the Gaulish system, and may well have been a developed social arrangement that was not an essential part of such a mode of thought in its primary forms. The place of animal-worship in the Celtic religion will be more fully considered in a later chapter. ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... Pirrauru or Piraungaru, by which married, and unmarried men, of the classes men and women which may intermarry, are solemnly allotted to each other as more or less permanent paramours. [See Mr. Howitt's NATIVE TRIBES OF SOUTH-EAST AUSTRALIA, and my SECRET OF THE TOTEM, chapter iii.] That custom, for some unknown reason, is confined to certain tribes possessing the two social divisions with the untranslated names MATTERI and KIRARU. These tribes range from Lake Eyre southward, perhaps, as far as the sea. Their peculiar custom ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker |
