Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/60

 34 incomprehensible.” “Mulkari tikkara ena—Lord who dwellest in the skies.” “Mulkari is the supernatural power who makes everything which the blacks cannot otherwise account for; he is a good beneficent person, and never kills anyone.” His home is in the skies. He was also a medicine-man, has the usual low myths about him, and invented magic. So writes Dr. Roth, who knows the local Pitta Pitta language—and is not a missionary.

The blacks may have no right to the higher ideas, but—there they are, and not borrowed, Waitz thinks, from Europeans. Here Mr. Hartland introduces the fact that the Noongahburrahs regard Baiame, or Byamee, as only a great medicine-man, with wives, and so forth (Folk-Lore, p. 303, note 1). “No doubt this is ‘folklore,’ and not part and parcel of the mysteries. Perhaps, therefore, Mr. Lang will seek to put it out of court as a ‘a kind of joke, with no sacredness about it.’&thinsp;” Mr. Lang will let it be as Mr. Hartland pleases, but the Noongahburrah happen to put it out of court as “a kind of joke, with no sacredness about it.” The low myths occur in the first series of Mrs. Langloh Parker’s Legendary Tales. About these she says: “They were all such legends as are told to the black piccaninnies; among the present (tales) are some they would not be allowed to hear, touching as they do on sacred subjects, taboo to the young” (More Legendary Tales, p. xv.). The “sacred” tales are, I suppose, the beautiful “Legend of Eerin,” and “Legend of the Flowers,” with the touching prayer for the soul of Eerin, and the account of the All-seeing Spirit. Thus Mr. Hartland may note the trend of Noongahburrah opinion: they draw a line between sacred and profane.

As to Bunjil or Pundjel, which seems equivalent to Baal,