Totemism.

The article presents information on Totemism. Totemism is the positing of an association between a system of social divisions and a system of objectifications. The word clan in everyday English usually pertains to a collectivity of people whose members are assumed to be related by blood and marriage: The emphasis is on people, not ideology. Anthropologists have employed the same term in their studies of tribal communities, but here just the opposite is true: The emphasis is on ideology, with the people in the clans often being treated as aspects of ideology. As noted, in Aboriginal Australian myth, totems metamorphose from one form to another and back. This transformative ability is crucial to a comprehension of clan totemism because it connects the Dreamtime to the Present Order. The bodies of newborns may be creatures of sexual intercourse, but their spirits are eternal. Hence, at death these latter return to their landed sources, and the cycle is repeated. Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.