If the question is put, why do men desire to deposit
their life outside their bodies? the answer can only be that, like
the giant in the fairy tale, they think it safer to do so than to
carry it about with them, just as people deposit their money with a
banker rather than carry it on their persons. We have seen that at
critical periods the life or soul is sometimes temporarily stowed
away in a safe place till the danger is past. But institutions like
totemism are not resorted to merely on special occasions of danger;
they are systems into which every one, or at least every male, is
obliged to be initiated at a certain period of life. Now the period
of life at which initiation takes place is regularly puberty; and
this fact suggests that the special danger which totemism and
systems like it are intended to obviate is supposed not to arise
till sexual maturity has been attained, in fact, that the danger
apprehended is believed to attend the relation of the sexes to each
other. It would be easy to prove by a long array of facts that the
sexual relation is associated in the primitive mind with many
serious perils; but the exact nature of the danger apprehended is
still obscure.
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