together and slew their father, ate him, and appropriated the females. In this they satisfied the same hate impulse that is a normal infantile trait and the basis of most neuroses, but which often leads to unconscious “displacement” of feelings, especially upon animals. At this point, however, the ambivalence of emotions proved decisive. The tender feelings which had always persisted by the side of the brothers’ hate for their father, gained the upper hand as soon as this hate was satisfied, and took the form of remorse and sense of guilt. “What the father’s presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’ which we know so well from psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism” (p. 236). These are “the oldest and most important taboos” of mankind: “namely not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with totem companions of the other sex” (p. 53), alongside which many if not all other taboos are “secondary, dis- placed and distorted.” The renunciation of the women or incest prohibition had also this practical foundation: that any attempt to divide the spoils, when each member of the band really wished to emulate the father and possess all the women, would have disrupted the organization which had made the brothers strong (p. 237). The totem sacrifice and feast reflected the killing and eating of the father, assuaged “the burning sense of guilt,” and brought about “a kind of reconciliation” or agreement by which the father-totem granted all wishes of his sons in return for their pledge to honor his life (p. 238). “All later religions prove to be . . . reactions aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever since has not let mankind come to rest” (p. 239).
This mere extrication and presentation of the framework of the Freudian hypothesis on the origin of socio-religious civilization is probably sufficient to prevent its acceptance; but a formal examination is only just.
First, the Darwin-Atkinson supposition is of course only hypo-
