A Totem (n.) is an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands as the common ancestor of the clan, the guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.
A Totem (n.) is an animal at once the clan's ancestor, guardian and oracle — which spares its own children, and which its children must never kill or eat.
A Totem (n.) makes a bond stronger than the bond of blood.
A Totem (n.) that must be killed is first offered apologies, and the violation — that is to say, the murder — softened by artifices and evasions.
A Totem (n.) unlike a fetish is never an individual but always a class — a whole species with which the savage feels an intimate, mutually protective relation.
A Totem (n.) that bites its own clansman proves him a stranger — the injured man is expelled from the clan.
A Totem (n.) is a clan mark, then a clan name, then the name of an ancestor, and lastly the name of something worshipped.
A Totem (n.) is at heart an easily drawn pictograph: totemism grew not from religious needs but from the practical need for a name that could be written — and once savages bore an animal's name, they imagined kinship with it.
A Totem (n.) is the visible representative of social religion: it embodies the community, which is the true object of worship.
A Totem (n.) eaten would be eating oneself — yet eaten ceremonially, it strengthens the identification that is the essence of totemism.
A Totem (n.) appeared in a child when little Árpád, pecked by a fowl, became one — cackling instead of speaking, gleefully slaughtering poultry then kissing the bodies, and announcing 'My father's the cock.'
A Totem (n.) is the father: primitive men say so themselves, calling it their common ancestor and primal father — psychoanalysis merely takes them at their word.
The Totem (n.) is a substitute for the father — which is why its killing is both forbidden and festive, both celebrated and mourned.
The Totem (n.) was the first father-surrogate and God a later one in which the father regained human shape; the idea of God replaced the totem rather than growing from it.
The Totem (n.) spares the tribe's members as its own children, just as it is honoured and spared by them as their ancestor.
A Totem (n.) is the murdered father come back as an animal — revered as the clan's ancestor and protector, and on one feast day killed and eaten by all the brothers together.