Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/59

 Rh join him in the skies, and will never die again." What am I to call the deed of the all-powerful Noorele, if I do not call it, as Mr. Eyre does, "creation"? I am not "importing ideas which do not belong to them," unless Mr. Eyre fables. Nor am I citing a witness prejudiced in favour of my notions. "A Deity or Great First Cause can hardly be said to be acknowledged," says Mr. Eyre, just before saying that He is acknowledged.

Yet Mr. Hartland writes: "We know that the idea of creation, as we use it, is completely foreign to savage ideas." I don't know how Mr. Hartland uses it; I use it to mean the making of all things. The Zuñis say that Ahonawilona "thought himself out into space." Perhaps it happened in that way. The details of making all things are obscure. There are scores of savage contradictory myths on the subject, but these do not invalidate the creative idea, unless the making of Adam out of dust, and of Eve out of Adam's rib, invalidates what Mr. Hartland justly calls "the sublime conception of the creative fiat as set forth in the book of Genesis." The very latest diaskeuasts or editors of Genesis did not keep it up to the level of the first part of the first chapter, and it would be absurd to ask naked savages to be more constant than they to a great idea. Contrary to Mr. Crawley's and Mr. Matthews's Baiame, who only made blackfellows (if that is what Mr. Matthews or Mr. Crawley means), is Mangarrah of the Larrakeah, who made everything except black-fellows. Dawed, a subordinate, appears to have made them; Mangarrah "made everything .... He never dies, and likes all blackfellows."

In North-West-Central Queensland we find Mul-ka-ri "a benevolent, omnipresent, supernatural being; anything