Totem-Post From the Haida Village of Masset: Two British Columbian House-Posts With Totemic Carvings, Remarks on Totemism (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Totem-Post From the Haida Village of Masset: Two British Columbian House-Posts With Totemic Carvings, Remarks on Totemism

Let us test the value of such an assumption by the example of the great malayo-polynesian heaven-god Tangaloa, known from the Indian Archipelago down to New Zealand, and of whom the widespread myth is told of his creating the earth with the aid of his daughter, Turi the snipe. In Samoa he is called Tangaloa langi or Tangaloa of the Sky, and he becomes incarnate in the snipe as his sacred creature. Therefore, according to the totem-theory we are now discussing, this Polynesian Jupiter, as he has been called, may be set down as a highly developed snipe. Indeed, the theory has no limit in a religion in which any priest of authority need only give out that his god will appear in a rat or an eel, for rats or eels to be established as his incarnations, and claimed by European theorists as totems from which the god himself arose in days of old.

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