Note 146 — Introductory Essay on Caste (continued 2)

Sir E. B. Tylor states: “In Polynesia, if a village god were accustomed to appear as an owl, and one of his votaries found a dead owl by the roadside, he would mourn over the sacred bird and bury it with much ceremony, but the god himself would not be thought to be dead, for he remains incarnate in all existing owls. According to Father Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a curious parallel to this notion. They worshipped the panes bird, which seems to have been an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood, and the body buried. Yet the natives maintained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacrificed each year, and more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages.”146 An account of the North American Indians quoted by the same author states that they believe all the animals of each species to have an elder brother, who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals, and this elder brother is marvellously great and powerful. According to another view each species has its archetype in the land of souls; there exists, for example, a manitu or archetype of all oxen, which animates all oxen.147