The Eternal Belief in Immortality & Worship of the Dead. James George Frazer
words, elements of weakness have been allowed to linger on, which under the sterner conditions of life entailed by fierce competition would long ago have been eliminated and have made way for elements better adapted to the environment. What is true of the human inhabitants of Australia in this respect is true also of its fauna and flora. It has long been recognised that the animals and plants of Australia represent on the whole more archaic types of life than the animals and plants of the larger continents; and the reason why these antiquated creatures have survived there rather than elsewhere is mainly that, the area of competition being so much restricted through the causes I have mentioned, these comparatively weak forms of animal and vegetable life have not been killed off by stronger competitors. That this is the real cause appears to be proved by the rapidity with which many animals and plants introduced into Australia from Europe tend to overrun the country and to oust the old native fauna and flora.108
In the centre of Australia the natural conditions of life are most unfavourable; hence the central aborigines have remained in a more primitive state than those of the coasts, where food and water are more plentiful.
I have said that among the causes which have kept the aborigines of Australia at a very low level of savagery must be reckoned the desert nature of a great part of the country. Now it is the interior of the continent which is the most arid, waste, and barren. The coasts are comparatively fertile, for they are watered by showers condensed from an atmosphere which is charged with moisture by the neighbouring sea; and this condensation is greatly facilitated in the south-eastern and eastern parts of the continent by a high range of mountains which here skirts the coast for a long distance, attracting the moisture from the ocean and precipitating it in the form of snow and rain. Thus the vegetation and hence the supply of food both animal and vegetable in these well-watered portions of the continent are varied and plentiful. In striking contrast with the fertility and abundance of these favoured regions are the stony plains and bare rocky ranges of the interior, where water is scarce, vegetation scanty, and animal life at certain seasons of the year can only with difficulty be maintained. It would be no wonder if the natives of these arid sun-scorched wildernesses should have lagged behind even their savage brethren of the coasts in respect of material and social progress; and in fact there are many indications that they have done so, in other words, that the aborigines of the more fertile districts near the sea have made a greater advance towards civilisation than the tribes of the desert interior. This is the view of men who have studied the Australian savages most deeply at first hand, and, so far as I can judge of the matter without any such first-hand acquaintance, I entirely agree with their opinion. I have given my reasons elsewhere and shall not repeat them here. All that I wish to impress on you now is that in aboriginal Australia a movement of social and intellectual progress, slow but perceptible, appears to have been setting from the coast inwards, and that, so far as such things can be referred to physical causes, this particular movement in Australia would seem to have been initiated by the sea acting through an abundant rainfall and a consequent abundant supply of food.109
Backward state of the Central Australian aborigines. They have no idea of a moral supreme being.
Accordingly, in attempting to give you some account of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the various races of mankind, I propose to begin with the natives of Central Australia, first, because the Australian aborigines are the most primitive savages about whom we have full and accurate information, and, second, because among these primitive savages the inhabitants of the central deserts are on the whole the most primitive. Like their brethren in the rest of the continent they were in their native condition absolutely ignorant of metals and of agriculture; they had no domestic animals except the dog, and they subsisted wholly by the products of the chase and the natural fruits, roots, and seeds, which the ground yielded without cultivation of any sort. In regard to their intellectual outlook upon the world, they were deeply imbued, as I shewed in a former lecture, with a belief in magic, but it can hardly be said that they possessed any religion in the strict sense of the word, by which I mean a propitiation of real or imaginary powers regarded as personal beings superior to man: certainly the Australian aborigines appear to have believed in no beings who deserve to be called gods. On this subject Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, our best authorities on these tribes, observe as follows: "The Central Australian natives—and this is true of the tribes extending from Lake Eyre in the south to the far north and eastwards across to the Gulf of Carpentaria—have no idea whatever of the existence of any supreme being who is pleased if they follow a certain line of what we call moral conduct and displeased if they do not do so. They have not the vaguest idea of a personal individual other than an actual living member of the tribe who approves or disapproves of their conduct, so far as anything like what we call morality is concerned. Any such idea as that of a future life of happiness or the reverse, as a reward for meritorious or as a punishment for blameworthy conduct, is quite foreign to them. … We know of no tribe in which there is a belief of any kind in a supreme being who rewards or punishes the individual according to his moral behaviour, using the word moral in the native sense."110
Central Australian theory that the souls of the dead survive and are afterwards reborn as infants.
But if the aborigines of Central Australia have no religion properly so called, they entertain beliefs and they observe practices out of which under favourable circumstances a religion might have been developed, if its evolution had not been arrested by the advent of Europeans. Among these elements of natural religion one of the most important is the theory which these savages hold as to the existence and nature of the dead. That theory is a very remarkable one. With a single exception, which I shall mention presently, they unanimously believe that death is not the end of all things for the individual, but that the human personality survives, apparently with little change, in the form of a spirit, which may afterwards be reborn as a child into the world. In fact they think that every living person without exception is the reincarnation of a dead person who lived on earth a longer or shorter time ago. This belief is held universally by the tribes which occupy an immense area of Australia from the centre northwards to the Gulf of Carpentaria.111 The single exception to which I have referred is furnished by the Gnanji, a fierce and wild-looking tribe who eat their dead enemies and perhaps also their dead friends.112 These savages deny that women have spirits which live after death; when a woman dies, that, they say, is the end of her. On the other hand, the spirit of a dead man, in their opinion, survives and goes to and fro on the earth visiting the places where his forefathers camped in days of old and destined to be born again of a woman at some future time, when the rains have fallen and bleached his bones.113 But why these primitive philosophers should deny the privilege of immortality to women and reserve it exclusively for men, is not manifest. All other Central Australian tribes appear to admit the rights of women equally with the rights of men in a life beyond the grave.
Central Australian theory as to the state of the dead. Certain conspicuous features of the landscape supposed to be tenanted by the souls of the dead waiting to be born again.
With regard to the state of the souls of the dead in the intervals between their successive reincarnations, the opinions of the Central Australian savages are clear and definite. Most civilised races who believe in the immortality of the soul have found themselves compelled to confess that, however immortal the spirits of the departed may be, they do not present themselves commonly to our eyes or ears, nor meddle much with the affairs of the living; hence the survivors have for the most part inferred that the dead do not hover invisible in our midst, but that they dwell somewhere, far away, in the height of heaven, or in the depth of earth, or in Islands of the Blest beyond the sea where the sun goes down. Not so with the simple aborigines of Australia. They imagine that the spirits of the dead continue to haunt their native land and especially certain striking natural features of the landscape, it may be a pool of water in a deep gorge of the barren hills,