Thus the individual totem has all the essential characteristics of the protecting ancestor and fills the same rôle: this is because it has the same origin and proceeds from the same idea.
Each of them, in fact, consists in a duplication of the soul. The totem, as the ancestor, is the soul of the individual, but externalized and invested with powers superior to those it is believed to possess while within the organism. Now this duplication is the result of a psychological necessity; for it only expresses the nature of the soul which, as we have seen, is double. In one sense, it is ours: it expresses our personality. But at the same time, it is outside of us, for it is only the reaching into us of a religious force which is outside of us. We cannot confound ourselves with it completely, for we attribute to it an excellence and a dignity by which it rises far above us and our empirical individuality. So there is a whole part of ourselves which we tend to project into the outside. This way of thinking of ourselves is so well established in our nature that we cannot escape it, even when we attempt to regard ourselves without having recourse to any religious symbols. Our moral consciousness is like a nucleus about which the idea of the soul forms itself; yet when it speaks to us, it gives the effect of an outside power, superior to us, which gives us our law and judges us, but which also aids and sustains us. When we have it on our side, we feel ourselves to be stronger against the trials of life, and better assured of triumphing over them, just as the Australian who, when trusting in his ancestor or his personal totem, feels himself more valiant against his enemies.[896] So there is something objective at the basis of these conceptions, whether we have in mind the Roman _genius_, the individual totem, or the Alcheringa ancestor; and this is why they have survived, in various forms, up to the present day. Everything goes just as if we really had two souls; one which is within us, or rather, which is us; the other which is above us, and whose function it is to control and assist the first one. Frazer thought that the individual totem was an external soul; but he believed that this exteriority was the result of an artifice and a magic ruse. In reality, it is implied in the very constitution of the idea of the soul.[897]
