The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead Volume I Part 11

In all these ceremonies you will observe that the action of the drama is strictly appropriate to the totem. In the drama of the Hakea flower totem the actors pretend to make and drink the beverage brewed from Hakea flowers; in the ceremony of the fish totem the actor feigns to be a fish and also to catch fish; in the ceremony of the plum-tree totem the actors pretend to knock down and eat plums; and in the ceremony of the ant totem the actors make believe to gather ants for food.

Similarly, to take a few more examples, in a ceremony of the witchetty grub totem of the Arunta tribe the body of the actor was decorated with lines of white and red down, and he had a shield adorned with a number of concentric circles of down. The smaller circles represented the bush on which the grub lives first of all, and the larger circles represented the bush on which the adult insect lays its eggs. When all was ready, the performer seated himself on the ground and imitated the grub, alternately doubling himself up and rising on his knees, while he extended his arms and made them quiver in imitation of the insect's wings; and every now and then he would bend over the shield and sway to and fro, and up and down, in imitation of the insect hovering over the bushes on which it lays its eggs.[153] In another ceremony of the witchetty grub totem, which followed immediately the one I have just described, the actor had two shields beside him. The smaller of the shields was ornamented with zigzag lines of white pipe-clay which were supposed to indicate the tracks of the grub; the larger shield was covered with larger and smaller series of concentric circles, the larger representing the seeds of a bush on which the insect feeds, while the smaller stood for the eggs of the adult insect. As before, the actor wriggled and flapped his arms in imitation of the fluttering of the insect when it first leaves its chrysalis case in the ground and attempts to fly. In acting thus he was supposed to represent a celebrated ancestor of the witchetty grub totem.[154]

[Sidenote: Ceremony of the emu totem.]

The last example of such ceremonies which I shall cite is one of the emu totem in the Arunta tribe. The body of the actor was decorated with perpendicular lines of white down reaching from his shoulders to his knees; and on his head he supported a towering head-piece tipped with a bunch of emu feathers in imitation of the neck and head of an emu. Thus arrayed he stalked backwards and forwards in the aimless fashion of the bird.[155]

[Sidenote: These dramatic ceremonies were probably at first magical rites intended to supply the people with food and other necessaries.]

What are we to think of the intention of these little dramas which the Central Australian aborigines regard as sacred and to the performance of which they devote so much time and labour? At first sight they are simply commemorative services, designed to represent the ancestors as they lived and moved in the far-past times, to recall their adventures, of which legend has preserved the memory, and to set them dramatically before the eyes of their living descendants. So far, therefore, the dramas might be described as purely historical in intention, if not in reality. But there are reasons for thinking that in all cases a deeper meaning underlies, or formerly underlay, the performance of all these apparently simple historical plays; in fact, we may suspect that originally they were all magical ceremonies observed for the practical purpose of supplying the people with food, water, sunshine, and everything else of which they stand in need. This conclusion is suggested first of all by the practice of the Arunta and other Central Australian tribes, who observe very similar ceremonies with the avowed intention of thereby multiplying the totemic animals and plants in order that they may be eaten by the tribe, though not by the particular clan which has these animals or plants for its totem. It is true that the Arunta distinguish these magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems from what we may call the more purely commemorative or historical performances, and they have a special name for the former, namely _intichiuma_, which they do not bestow on the latter. Yet these _intichiuma_ or magical ceremonies resemble the commemorative ceremonies so closely that it is difficult to suppose they can always have been wholly distinct. For example, in the magical ceremonies for the multiplication of witchetty grubs the performers pretend to be the insects emerging from their chrysalis cases,[156] just as the actors do in the similar commemorative ceremony which I have described; and again in a magical ceremony for the multiplication of emus the performers wear head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the bird, and they mimic its gait,[157] exactly as the actors do in the commemorative ceremony. It seems reasonable, therefore, to conjecture that the ceremonies which now are, or seem to be, purely commemorative or historical were originally magical in intention, being observed for the practical purpose of multiplying edible animals and plants or supplying other wants of the tribe.

[Sidenote: Among the Warramunga these dramatic ceremonies are avowedly performed as magical rites.]

Now this conjecture is strongly confirmed by the actual usage of the Warramunga tribe, amongst whom the commemorative or historical dramas are avowedly performed as magical rites: in other words, the Warramunga attribute a magical virtue to the simple performance of such dramas: they think that by merely acting the parts of their totemic ancestors they thereby magically multiply the edible animals or plants which these ancestors had for their totems. Hence in this tribe the magical ceremonies and the dramatic performances practically coincide: with them, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say, the _intichiuma_ or magical ceremonies (called by the Warramunga _thalamminta_) "for the most part simply consist in the performance of a complete series representing the _alcheringa_ history of the totemic ancestor. In this tribe each totemic group has usually one great ancestor, who arose in some special spot and walked across the country, making various natural features as he did so,--creeks, plains, ranges, and water-holes,--and leaving behind him spirit individuals who have since been reincarnated. The _intichiuma_ [or magical] ceremony of the totem really consists in tracking these ancestors' paths, and repeating, one after the other, ceremonies commemorative of what are called the _mungai_ spots, the equivalent of the _oknanikilla_ amongst the Arunta--that is, the places where he left the spirit children behind."[158] Apparently the Warramunga imagine that by imitating a totemic ancestor at the very place where he left spirit children of the same totem behind him, they thereby enable these spirit children to be born again and so increase the food supply, whenever their totem is an edible animal or plant; for we must always remember that in the mind of these savages the idea of a man or woman is inextricably confused with the idea of his or her totem; they seem unable to distinguish between the two, and therefore they believe that in multiplying human beings at their local totemic centres (_mungai_ or _oknanikilla_) they simultaneously multiply their totems; and as the totems are commonly edible animals and plants, it follows that in the opinion of the Warramunga the general effect of performing these ancestral plays is to increase the supply of food of the tribe. No wonder, therefore, that the dramas are sacred, and that the natives attribute the most serious significance to their performance: the neglect to perform them might, in their judgment, bring famine and ruin on the whole tribe. As Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, speaking of these ceremonies, justly observe: "Their proper performance is a matter of very great importance in the eyes of the natives, because, not only do they serve to keep alive and hand down from generation to generation the traditions of the tribe, but they are, at least amongst the Warramunga, intimately a.s.sociated with the most important object of maintaining the food supply, as every totemic group is held responsible for the maintenance of the material object the name of which it bears."[159]

[Sidenote: General view of the att.i.tude of the Central Australian natives towards their dead.]

To sum up the att.i.tude of the Central Australian natives towards their dead. They believe that their dead are constantly undergoing reincarnation by being born again of women into the world, in fact that every living man, woman, and child is nothing but a dead person come to life again, that so it has been from the beginning and that so it will be to the end. Of a special world of the departed, remote and different from the material world in which they live and from the familiar scenes to which they have been accustomed from infancy, they have no conception; still less, if that is possible, have they any idea of a division of the world of the dead into a realm of bliss and a realm of woe, where the spirits of the good live ineffably happy and the spirits of the bad live unspeakably miserable. To their simple minds the spirits of the dead dwell all about them in the rocky gorges, the barren plains, the wooded dells, the rustling trees, the still waters of their native land, haunting in death the very spots where they last entered into their mothers' wombs to be born, and where in future they will again enter into the wombs of other women to be born again as other children into the world. And so, they think, it will go on for ever and ever.

Such a creed seems at first sight, as I have pointed out, irreconcilable with a worship of the dead in the proper sense of the word; and so perhaps it would be, if these savages were strictly consistent and logical in their theories. But they are not. They admit that their remote ancestors, in other words, that they themselves in former incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impa.s.sable gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if left to themselves, might come to hold that the dead return no more to the land of the living, and that, acknowledging as they do the vast superiority of their remote ancestors to themselves, they might end by worshipping them, at first simply as powerful ancestral spirits, and afterwards as supernatural deities, whose original connexion with humanity had been totally forgotten. In point of fact we saw that among the Warramunga the mythical water-snake Wollunqua, who is regarded as an ancestor of a totemic clan, has made some progress towards deification; for while he is still regarded as the forefather of the clan which bears his name, it is no longer supposed that he is born again of women into the world, but that he lives eternal and invisible under the water of a haunted pool, and that he has it in his power both to help and to harm his people, who pray to him and perform ceremonies in his honour. This awful being, whose voice is heard in the peal of thunder and whose dreadful name may not be p.r.o.nounced in common life, is not far from G.o.dhead; at least he is apparently the nearest approach to it which the imagination of these rude savages has been able to conceive. Lastly, as I have pointed out, the reverence which the Central Australians entertain for their dead ancestors is closely bound up with their totemism; they fail to distinguish clearly or at all between men and their totems, and accordingly the ceremonies which they perform to commemorate the dead are at the same time magical rites designed to ensure an abundant supply of food and of all the other necessaries and conveniences which savage life requires or admits of; indeed, we may with some probability conjecture that the magical intention of these ceremonies is the primary and original one, and that the commemorative intention is secondary and derivative. If that could be proved to be so (which is hardly to be expected), we should be obliged to conclude that in this as in so many enquiries into the remote human past we detect evidence of an Age of Magic preceding anything that deserves to be dignified with the name of religion.

That ends what I have to say at present as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the Central Australian aborigines. In my next lecture I propose to pursue the enquiry among the other tribes of Australia.

[Footnote 137: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 228 _sq._]

[Footnote 138: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 229 _sq._]

[Footnote 139: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 230 _sq._]

[Footnote 140: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 231-238.]

[Footnote 141: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 238.]

[Footnote 142: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 238 _sq._]

[Footnote 143: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 239-247.]

[Footnote 144: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 248.]

[Footnote 145: "On the other hand there is a great difference between the Wollunqua and any other totem, inasmuch as the particular animal is purely mythical, and except for the one great progenitor of the totemic group, is not supposed to exist at the present day" (Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 248).]

[Footnote 146: The _wingara_ is the equivalent of the Arunta _alcheringa_, that is, the earliest legendary or mythical times of which the natives profess to have knowledge.]

[Footnote 147: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 249 _sq._]

[Footnote 148: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 33 _sq._, 177 _sq._]

[Footnote 149: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 297 _sq._]

[Footnote 150: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 316 _sq._]

[Footnote 151: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 320.]

[Footnote 152: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 199-204.]

[Footnote 153: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 179 _sq._]

[Footnote 154: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 179 _sq._]

[Footnote 155: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 358 _sq._, and p. 343, fig 73.]

[Footnote 156: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 176.]

[Footnote 157: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 182 _sq._]

[Footnote 158: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 297.]

[Footnote 159: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 197.]

LECTURE VI

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE OTHER ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA

[Sidenote: Customs and beliefs concerning the dead in the other tribes of Australia.]

In the last lecture I concluded my account of the beliefs and practices of the Central Australian aborigines in regard to the dead. To-day I propose to consider the customs and beliefs concerning the dead which prevail among the native tribes in other parts of Australia. But at the outset I must warn you that our information as to these other tribes is far less full and precise than that which we possess as to the tribes of the centre, which have had the great advantage of being observed and described by two highly qualified scientific observers, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. Our knowledge of all other Australian tribes is comparatively fragmentary, and accordingly it is impossible to give even an approximately complete view of their notions concerning the state of the human spirit after death, and of the rites which they observe for the purpose of disarming or propitiating the souls of the departed. We must therefore content ourselves with more or less partial glimpses of this side of native religion.

[Sidenote: Belief in the reincarnation of the dead among the natives of Queensland. The _ngai_ spirits.]

The first question we naturally ask is whether the belief in the reincarnation of the dead, which prevails universally among the Central tribes, reappears among tribes in other parts of the continent. It certainly does so, and although the evidence on this subject is very imperfect it suffices to raise presumption that a similar belief in the rebirth or reincarnation of the dead was formerly universal among the Australian aborigines. Unquestionably the belief is entertained by some of the natives of Queensland, who have been described for us by Mr. W.

E. Roth. Thus, for example, the aborigines on the Pennefather River think that every person's spirit undergoes a series of reincarnations, and that in the interval between two reincarnations the spirit resides in one or other of the haunts of Anjea, a mythical being who causes conception in women by putting mud babies into their bodies. Such spots, haunted by the fabulous being Anjea and by the souls of the dead awaiting rebirth, may be a tree, a rock, or a pool of water; they clearly correspond to the local totem centres (_oknanikilla_ among the Arunta, _mungai_ among the Warramunga) of the Central Australian tribes which I described in former lectures. The natives of the Pennefather River observe a ceremony at the birth of a child in order to ascertain the exact spot where its spirit tarried in the interval since its last incarnation; and when they have discovered it they speak of the child as obtained from a tree, a rock, or a pool of water, according to the place from which its spirit is supposed to have pa.s.sed into its mother.[160]

Readers of the cla.s.sics can hardly fail to be reminded of the Homeric phrase to be "born of an oak or a rock,"[161] which seems to point to a similar belief in the possibility of human souls awaiting reincarnation in the boughs of an oak-tree or in the cleft of a rock. In the opinion of the Pennefather natives all disembodied human spirits or _choi_, as they call them, are mischief-makers and evildoers, for they make people sick or crazy; but the medicine-men can sometimes control them for good or evil. They wander about in the bush, but there are certain hollow trees or clumps of trees with wide-spreading branches, which they most love to haunt, and they can be heard in the rustling of the leaves or the crackling of the boughs at night. Anjea himself, who puts babies into women, is never seen, but you may hear him laughing in the depths of the forest, among the rocks, in the lagoons, and along the mangrove swamps; and when you hear his laugh you may be sure that he has got a baby.[162] If a native happens to hurt himself near a tree, he imagines that the spirit of some dead person is lurking among the branches, and he will never cut that tree down lest a worse thing should befall him at the hands of the vengeful ghost.[163] A curious feature in the beliefs of these Pennefather natives is that apart from the spirit called _choi_, which lives in a disembodied state between two incarnations, every person is supposed to have a spirit of a different sort called _ngai_, which has its seat in the heart; they feel it beating within their breast; it talks to them in sleep and so is the cause of dreams.

At death a man's _ngai_ spirit does not go away into the bush to await reincarnation like his _choi_ spirit; on the contrary, it pa.s.ses at once into his children, boys and girls alike; for before their father's death children are supposed not to possess a _ngai_ spirit; if a child dies before its father, they think that it never had a _ngai_ spirit at all.

And the _ngai_ spirit may leave a man in his lifetime as well as at death; for example, when a person faints, the natives think that he does so because his _ngai_ spirit has departed from him, and they will stamp on the ground to make it return. On the other hand the _choi_ spirit is supposed never to quit a man during life; it is thought to be in some undefined way related to the shadow, whereas the _ngai_ spirit, as we saw, manifests itself in the beating of the heart. When a woman dies, her _ngai_ spirit goes not into her children but into her sisters, one after the other; and when all the sisters are dead, the woman's _ngai_ spirit goes away among the mangroves and perishes altogether.[164]

Thus these savages explain the phenomena of birth and death, of conscious and unconscious life, by a theory of a double human spirit, one a.s.sociated with the heart and the other with the shadow. The psychology is rudimentary, still it is interesting as an attempt to solve problems which still puzzle civilised man.

[Sidenote: Beliefs of the natives of Cape Bedford in Queensland.]

Other Queensland aborigines a.s.sociate the vital principle not with the heart but with the breath. For example, at Cape Bedford the natives call it _wau-wu_ and think that it never leaves the body sleeping or waking till death, when it haunts its place of burial for a time and may communicate with the living. Thus, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, it will often appear to a near kinsman or intimate friend, tell him the pitiful tale how he was done to death by an enemy, and urge him to revenge. Again, the soul of a man's dead father or friend may bear him company on a journey and, like the beryl-stone in Rossetti's poem _Rose Mary_, warn him of an ambuscade lurking for him in a spot where the man himself sees nothing. But the spirits of the dead do not always come with such friendly intent; they may drive the living distracted; a peculiar form of mental excitement and bewilderment is attributed to their action. Further, these aborigines at Cape Bedford, in Queensland, believe that all spirits of nature are in fact souls of the dead. Such spirits usually leave their haunts in the forests and caves at night.

Stout-hearted old men can see and converse with them and receive from them warnings of danger; but women and children fear these spirits and never see them. But some spirits of the dead, when they have ceased to haunt their places of burial, go away eastward and are reincarnated in white people; hence these savages often look for a resemblance to some deceased tribesman among Europeans, and frequently wonder why it is that the white man, on whom their fancy has pitched, remembers nothing about his former life as a black man among blacks.[165]

[Sidenote: Beliefs of the natives of the Tully River in Queensland.]

The natives of the Tully River in Queensland a.s.sociate the principle of life both with the breath and with the shadow. It departs from the body temporarily in sleep and fainting-fits and permanently in death, after which it may be heard at night tapping on the top of huts or creaking in the branches of trees. It is everlasting, so far as these savages have any idea of eternity, and further it is intangible; hence in its disembodied state it needs no food, and none is set out for it. The disposition of these disembodied spirits of the dead is good or bad, according to their disposition in life. Yet when a man is alone by himself, the spirit even of one of his own dead kinsfolk will sometimes come and do him a mischief. On the other hand it can do nothing to several people together; there is safety in numbers. They may all see and hear the ghost, but he will not attack them. Hence these savages have been taught from childhood to beware of going alone: solitary people are liable at any moment to be a.s.sailed by the spirits of the dead. The only means they know of warding off these ghostly a.s.sailants is by lighting good fires.[166]