The Eternal Belief in Immortality & Worship of the Dead. James George Frazer
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
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
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.
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 associated 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
General view of the attitude of the Central Australian natives towards their dead.
To sum up the attitude 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 impassable 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