Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/63

 Rh “Father Ours.” The Being, Our Father, who inspires such songs is not a mere polygamous medicine-man or merely a star known as Fomalhaut. He is also religiously, and I think very touchingly, envisaged. He lives, and inspires the sad last singers of a fading people. But the missionaries put down these songs and sentiments; this is an old song by one of a family of hereditary bards. “The white man knows little or nothing of the blackfellows’ songs.” Mr. Manning’s informant was angry when asked for the Baiame song. He said that Mr. Manning knew too much already. And we discuss the natives’ religion, we white fellows, in ignorance of their hymns! They cannot count up to seven, so they have no right to be poets.

Coming to the Kurnai Mungan-ngaur, Our Father, he was, says Mr. Hartland, “sufficiently carnal to have a son.” There is nothing especially “carnal” in having a son not born of female kind, and, as Mr. Hartland remarks, “Mr. Howitt tells us nothing of Mungan-ngaur’s wife.” Perhaps, like Noorele (Eyre, 1845) and Baiame (Manning, 1845), Mungan-ngaur was celibate, and his sons were Æons, as in Gnostic doctrine. That “no myth of creation” is told about Mungan by Mr. Howitt I had expressly stated. But, if Mungan’s “attributes are precisely those of Baiame,” as Mr. Hartland cites Mr. Howitt, then a suspicion of being creative attaches to Mungan, even if it is not explicitly recorded.

Mr. Hartland appears to have been unsuccessful in his search for scandals about Our Father in Kurnai. As he says, very nasty things may turn up. I shall be surprised if they do not. Threats of “awful disclosures” in the future about Mungan-ngaur are held over me in terrorem (Folk-Lore, p. 310). But it is in vain that any man blackmails Mungan-ngaur. Here is the old ignoratio elenchi!