Excerpt from The Origins of Religion, and Other Essays
With regard to the essay on Apollo and the Mouse, it is to be remembered that animals acquire sacredness in religion in many ways besides what they may inherit from totemism. The works of Mr. J. G. Frazer show that, among agricultural peoples, the Corn Spirit is recognised in a vast number of animal forms, which are prominent in agricultural magic and religion. Thus a sacred animal associated with a god, say the Pig with Demeter, is not necessarily a survival. Of a totem. That the indo-european peoples were once totemic cannot be certainly proved, though many facts point in that direction. When we first meet them in history they have reached a point in civilisation at which we could not expect to discover more than faint and dubious totemic traces.
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