totemism's Usage Examples:

"With the decline of totemism arose the need for human sacrifice - the only means of re-establishing the broken tie of kinship when the animal species was no longer akin to man.

The Dene (Tinneh) myths resembled those of the Eskimo, and all the hunting tribes of eastern Canada and United States and the Mississippi valley have a mythology based upon their zootechny and their totemism.

In fact, while Robertson Smith (in Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, as well as his Religion of the Semites, followed by Stade and Benzinger) strongly advocated the view that clear traces of totemism can be found in early Israel, later writers, such as Marti, Gesch.

totemism, astral religion, jurisprudence).

But we apply no such explanation to similar savage legends, and our theory is that the Osirian myth is only one of these retained to the time of Plutarch by the religious conservatism of a__race which, to the time of Plutarch, preserved in full vigour most of the practices of totemism.

We are not concerned with the question whether the earliest forms of recorded religious consciousness such as animism, or totemism, or fetishism, were themselves degradations of a primitive revelation or not.

How far totemism, or belief in deified animal ancestors, existed in prehistoric Israel, as evidenced by the tribal names Simeon (hyena, wolf), Caleb (dog), IIamor (ass), Rahel (ewe) and Leah (wild cow), as well as by the laws respecting clean and unclean animals, is too intricate and speculative a problem to be discussed here.

Synonyms:

belief,

Antonyms:

unbelief, content,