Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/43

 Rh distinguished by Mr. Howitt from a "Great Spirit," is the same thing as the bulabong of a dead man. But, in Mr. Howitt's earlier statement, Daramulun is only the bulabong of a dead man. Which version am I to accept? Surely we cannot injure the cause of science by waiting till Mr. Howitt can oblige us with his mature opinion. We need not refine as to the shades of sense of the word "spirit." A savage can distinguish between the surviving bulabong of a dead man, and the existence (up to date) of a primal being who was before death, and (up to date) is not dead. Bunjil is of the latter class, and so is Baiame. I wish to be more positively informed as to which class Daramulun belongs to, in Mr. Howitt's present opinion.

As to the Wiraijuri myth according to which Daramulun does not exist at all, having been "destroyed" by Baiame, it has nothing to do with the creed of which Mr. Howitt has given us an account. The Wiraijuri live far remote from the Coast Murring, who, so far as appears, know nothing about Baiame at all. It seems that I erroneously grouped the Wiraijuri among nations who regard Daramulun as supreme. They do not, and their beliefs appear to be the result of syncretism, unless we suppose that, where Daramulun is supreme, his worshippers have suppressed Baiame.

I must admit that I have no explicit proof that Daramulun is regarded as a Creator. He is only the "Great Master" (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol xiii., p. 442), the Father (xiii., 443), the sky-dweller (xiii., 192), the institutor of society (xiii., 459), the power whose voice "calls to the rain to fall and make the grass green" (xiii., 446), the being for whom "the boys are made so that Daramulun likes them," a process involving repeated cries of nga = "good" (xiii., 451), the person who lends a "supernatural sanction" to "beliefs which govern tribal and individual morality" (xiii., 459). Daramulun's attributes and powers are "precisely those of Baiame" (xiv., 321), who is spoken of as a Creator according to Mr. Ridley and others, though this does not involve