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Totems, History, and
Evolutionary Complexity

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Totem magic is a popular topic on many mailing lists, including the Sisters of Avalon, where this discussion hails from. We had been talking about different totems and people started to work their way down the evolutionary ladder: Do all totems have to be "photogenic megafauna" like Eagle and Bear? Can Mouse be a totem? Can insects be totems? What about something even smaller ... like diatoms? We finally summed up the debate like this: Is there a minimum level of complexity and/or awareness required in order for a species to serve as a totem? If so, what is that level and why?

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I originally argued that there had to be a lower limit, for a variety of reasons. First, a totem has to have enough awareness to exist on the spirit plane as an active entity. Second, a totem must have distinctive traits and/or powers which affect chosen humans; for instance, Hawk brings the gift of keen vision both physical and metaphysical. Third, a totem should be recognized as such by some tradition that commonly works with totems. This made a pretty nice presentation and made sense to me.

But then I happened to recount the debate to my partner Doug, who came up with an absolutely brilliant counter-argument, which went something like this: Suppose that Adolf Hitler's totem was Virus. Consider the insidious nature of both, the amount of destruction wreaked, the percentage of deaths, and the tendency to take over another entity and stuff it full of one's own programming; then consider the fact that long after Hitler's death, his damnable ideas continue to reproduce in small isolated populations with occasional larger-scale outbreaks; and finally consider that a good look at Holocaust history combined with any kind of rational thought can serve as a very effective "vaccination" against infection by Nazi memes. Virus as Hitler's totem sounds incredibly apt to me, so much so that I abandoned my earlier arguments.

Now, Virus is the bottom rung on the ladder of life; in fact, some scientists still insist that a virus is not even alive because it can't reproduce on its own but must find a host cell to use as a "factory" for churning out virus copies. So there can't be anything lower on the ladder than Virus, thus if Virus can serve as a totem it stands to reason that evolutionary sophistication alone is not a qualifying/disqualifying factor. One might argue that prions are lower even than viruses, but again many scientists do not consider prions a life form at all, but rather a kind of organic poison.

This raises some other fascinating ideas. For instance, totems are typically taken from animals, plants, etc. native to and known in a particular region. The pool of totems available has expanded considerably as more of us have a chance to know animals not native to where we happen to live. Now, suppose that part of that knowledge has to do with awareness such that as we developed ever-more-powerful microscopes, we also expanded the pool in a different direction. Diatom could not serve as a totem earlier because the physical manifestation isn't visible to the naked eye, so nobody knew Diatom was there. Now that we know, does that make a difference? There is already one person on the Sisters of Avalon with a strong attraction to diatoms, and I've always been rather fascinated by the little gems myself. So Diatom as a totem in contemporary times also sounds reasonable to me.

Historically, it has been possible to recognize the "personality" of various diseases (does anyone question that Yersinia pestis / Black Death has a conspicuously vicious and predatory mien?) but nobody knew exactly what caused the disease until recent decades. Might a vile kind of totem spirit, such as Virus, qualify as the "evil spirit" or "black vapour" sometimes described in ancient medical texts? Not all totems are nice, after all; some tribes used to spot troublemakers by noting who Weasel had taken a fancy to, for instance. I think this connection offers a new explanation for such references, though not necessarily the only explanation.

Also, does a totem spirit necessarily fade away when the last physical manifestation dies? Can it survive by using a non-living anchor? I know Mammoth is still around, from very direct and subtly dramatic personal experience. At Ancient Lifeways Camp there is an old quarry cave decorated in traditional fashion, with red ochre paintings of a Mammoth and a Bison, which I and other campers helped work on. One night we went up to the cave to sit and listen to stories, and our storyteller happened to recount one about Mammoth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sudden blue-white spark hovering in the air, and I thought it was a strange shade for a firefly; my friend sitting next to me also saw this and we watched for the "firefly" to light up again, which never happened. The visual effect was exactly as if the stone wall had suddenly turned transparent and let a single star shine through. (There was no electricity in the cave and no mundane explanation. We checked diligently.) Later when we turned the lanterns back up, I noticed that the spark had appeared precisely where Mammoth's eye was on the cave wall. And then I KNEW: Mammoth had looked at us. What a thrill!

Since almost all cave paintings are Spirit paintings imbued with great magical power, it stands to reason that they might make an acceptable vessel/anchor for a totem spirit whose animal form had all died out. Alternatively, there could still be some living mammoths roaming around somewhere. This is no excuse to let anything go extinct, but it does raise some intriguing questions about the nature of totem spirits and their magic. Seeing how totems have evolved and changed over the years also makes for interesting study, and leaves me wondering what will turn up next.

Totems, History, and Evolutionary Complexity

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Totems, History, and
Evolutionary Complexity