held to be both the god and the animal or plant in which the god
manifested himself, it followed that in Australia we had, preserved to
this day, the earliest form of sacrifice--that in which the totem animal
was itself the totem god to whom it was offered as a sacrifice, and was
itself--or rather himself--the sacramental meal furnished to his
worshippers. The totem was eaten, it was conjectured, with the object of
acquiring the qualities of the divine creature, or of absorbing them
into the person of the worshipper. That the totem was eaten
sacramentally rested, as has just been said, on the conjecture made by
Robertson Smith in 1889; but in 1899 Dr. (now Sir James) Frazer declared
that, thanks to the investigations of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, 'here,
in the heart of Australia, among the most primitive savages known to
us, we find the actual observance of that totem sacrament which
Robertson Smith, with the intuition of genius, divined years ago, but of
which positive examples have hitherto been wanting.'

On the foundation thus laid by the intuition of Robertson Smith and
approved in 1899 by Sir James Frazer, a simple and complete theory of
the evolution of religion was possible. In any one tribe there were
several totem-kins. The totem of each kin was divine, but the
personality of a totem was so undeveloped in conception that, though it
might, and on the theory did, develop into a deity, it was originally
more of the nature of a spirit than a god, and totemism proper might
easily pass into polydaemonism, that is a system in which the beings
worshipped were conceived to possess a personality more clearly defined
than that attributed to totems but less developed than that assigned to
deities. From the beginning each tribe had worshipped a plurality of
totems; it was, therefore, readily intelligible that, as these totems
came to be credited with more and more definite and developed
personality, the plurality of totems became not only a polydaemonism,