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 totemism. About the central Arunta tribe with its neighbours, the Urabunna, we have the evidence very carefully collected by Mr Gillen, a protector of the aborigines, and Professor Baldwin Spencer (Native Tribes of Central Australia). Concerning the peoples north from the centre to the Gulf of Carpentaria, the same scholars furnish a copious account in their Northern Tribes. These two explorers had the confidence of the blacks; witnessed their most secret ceremonies, magical and initiatory; and collected their legends. Their books, however, contain no philological information as to the structure and interrelation of the dialects, information which is rarely to be found in the works of English observers in Australia. As far as appears, the observers conversed with the tribes only in “pidgin English.” If this be the case that lingua franca is current among some eighteen central-northern tribes speaking various native dialects. We are told nothing about the languages used in each case; perhaps the Arunta men who accompanied the expedition arranged a system of interpreters.

For the Dieri tribe, neighbours of the Urabunna, we have copious evidence in Native Tribes of South-East Australia by the late Mr A. W. Howitt, who studied the peoples for forty years; was made free of their initiatory ceremonies; and obtained intelligence from settlers in regions which he did not visit. We have also legends with Dieri texts and translations from the Rev. Mr Siebert, a missionary among the Dieri. That tribe appears now to exist in a very dwindled condition under missionary supervision. The accounts of tribes from the centre to the south-east by Mr R. E. Mathew, are scattered in many English, Australian and American learned periodicals. Mr Mathew has given a good deal of information about some of the dialects. His statements as to the line of descent and on other points among certain tribes are at variance with those of Messrs Spencer and Gillen (see an article by Mr A. R. Brown in Man, March 1910). Mr Mathew, however, does not enable us to test the accuracy of his informants among the northern tribes, which is unfortunate. For the Aranda (or Arunta) of a region apparently not explored by Messrs Spencer and Gillen, and for the neighbouring Loritja tribe, we have Die Aranda und Loritja Stämme, two volumes by the Rev. C. Strehlow (Baer, Frankfurt am Main, 1907, 1908). Mr Strehlow is a German missionary who, after working among the Dieri and acquiring their language, served for many years among a branch of the Arunta (the Aranda), differing considerably in dialect, myths and usages from the Arunta of Messrs Spencer and Gillen. In some points, for example as to the primal ancestors and the spirits diffused by them for incarnation in human bodies, the Aranda and Loritja are more akin to the northern tribes than to Mr Spencer's Arunta. In other myths they resemble some south-eastern tribes reported on by Mr Howitt. Unlike the Arunta of Messrs Spencer and Gillen, but like the Arunta described by Mr Gillen earlier in The Horn Expedition, they believe in “a magnified non-natural man,” Altjira, with a goose-foot, dwelling in the heavens. Unlike the self-created Atnatu of the Kaitish of Messrs Spencer and Gillen, he is not said to have created things, or to take any concern about human beings, as Atnatu does in matters of ceremonial. Mr Strehlow gives Aranda and Lortija texts in the original, with translations and philological remarks. Mr Frazer, in his Totemism, makes no use of Mr Strehlow's information (save in a single instance). To us it seems worthy of study. His reason for this abstention is that, in a letter to him (Melbourne, March 10, 1908), Mr Spencer says that for at least twenty years the Lutheran Missions have taught the natives “that altjira means ‘god’; have taught that their sacred ceremonies and secular dances are ‘wicked’; have prohibited them, and have never seen them. ” Flour and tobacco, &c., are only given to natives who attend church and school. Natives have been married who, according to native customary law, belong to groups to which marriage is forbidden. For these reasons Mr Frazer cannot attempt “to filter the native liquor clear of its alien sediment,” (Totemism, i. 186, note 2). Against this we may urge that, as regards the goose-footed sky-dweller, Mr Strehlow reports less of his active interest in human affairs than Mr Gillen does concerning his “Great Ulthaana of the

heavens” among the Arunta. Mr Strehlow's being, Altjira, has a name apparently meaning “mystic” or sacred, which is applied to other things, for example to the inherited maternal totem of each native. His names for Altjira (god) and for the totemic ancestors (totem gods), are inappropriate, but may be discounted. Many other tribes who are discussed by Mr Frazer have been long under missionary influence as well as the Aranda. According to Mr Frazer the Dieri tribe had enjoyed a German Lutheran mission station (since 1866) for forty-four years up to 1910. About 150 Dieri were alive in 1909 (Totemism, iii. 344). Nevertheless the Dieri myths published by Mr Siebert in the decadence of the tribe, and when the remnant was under missionaries, show no “alien sediment.” Nor do the traditions of Mr Strehlow's Aranda. Their traditions are closely akin, now to those of the Arunta, now to those of the northern tribes, now to those of the Euahlayi of Mrs Langloh Parker (The Euahlayi Tribe) in New South Wales, and once more to those of Mr Howitt's south-eastern tribes. There is no trace of Christian influence in the Aranda and Loritja matter, no vestige of “alien” (that is, of European) “sediment,” but the account of Atnatu among the Kaitish reported on by Messrs Spencer and Gillen reads like a savage version of Milton's “Fall of the Angels” in Paradise Lost. For these reasons we do not reject the information of Mr Strehlow, who is master of several tribal languages, and, of course, does not encourage wicked native rites by providing supplies of flour, tobacco, &c., during the performances, as Mr Howitt and others say that they found it necessary to do. Sceptical colonists have been heard to aver that natives will go on performing rites as long as white men will provide supplies. Thus if a woman, whatever her own totem, and whatever her husband's may be, becomes conscious of her child's life in a known centre of Wild Cat spirits, her child's totem is Wild Cat, and so with all the rest.

As a consequence, a totem sometimes here appears in what the people call the “wrong” (i.e. not the original) exogamous division; and persons may marry within their own totem name, if that totem be in the “right” exogamous division, which is not theirs. Each totem spirit is among the Arunta associated with an amulet or churinga of stone; these are of various shapes, and are decorated with concentric circles, spirals, cupules, and other archaic patterns. These amulets are only used in this sense by the Arunta nation and their neighbours the Kaitish, “and it is this idea of spirit individuals associated with churinga and resident in certain definite spots that lies at the root of the present

totemic system of the Arunta,” says Messrs Spencer and Gillen. Every Arunta born incarnates a pre-existent primal spirit attached to one of the stone churinga dropped by primal totemic beings, all of one totem in each case, at a place called an oknanikilla. Each child belongs to the totem of the primal beings of the place, where the mother became aware of the child's life.

Thus the peculiar causes which have produced the unique Arunta licence of marrying within the totem are conspicuously obvious.

Contradictory Theories about the Arunta Abnormal Totemism.—At this point theories concerning the origin of totemism begin to differ irreconcilably. Mr Frazer, Mr Spencer, and, apparently Dr Rivers, hold that, in Australia at least, totemism was originally “conceptional.” It began in the belief by the women that pregnancy was caused by the entrance into them of some spirit associated with a visible object, usually animal or vegetable; while the child born, in each case, was that object. Hence that class of objects was tabued to the child; was its totem, but such totems were not hereditary.

Next, for some unknown reason, the tribes were divided into two bodies or segments. The members of segment A may not intermarry; they must marry persons of segment B, and vice versa. Thus were evolved the primal forms of totemism and exogamy now represented in the law of the Arunta nation alone. Here, and here alone, marriage within the totem is permitted. The theory is, apparently, that, in all other exogamous and totemic peoples, totems had been, for various reasons, made hereditary, before exogamy was enforced by the legislator in his wisdom. Thus, all over the totemic world, except in the Arunta nation, the method of the legislator was simply to place one set of totem kins in tribal segment A, and the other in segment B, and make the segments exogamous and intermarrying. Thus it was impossible for any person to marry another of the same totem. This is the theory of Mr Frazer.

Upholders of the contradictory system maintain that the Arunta nation has passed through and out of the universal and normal system of hereditary and exogamous totemism into its present condition, by reason of the belief that children are incarnations of pre-existing animal or vegetable spirits, plus the unique Arunta idea of the connexion of such spirits with their stone churinga. Where this combination of the two beliefs does not occur, there the Arunta non-hereditary and non-exogamous totemism does not occur. It would necessarily arise in any normal tribe which adopted the two Arunta beliefs, which are not “primitive.”

Arguments against Mr Frazer's Theory.—There was obviously a time, it is urged, when all totems were, as everywhere else,