Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/64

 38 Mungan may, Mr. Hartland hopes he will, be found out. "It is all one to Hippoclides." I do not, I never did, maintain that the Kurnai have pure ideas, and none but pure ideas, of "Our Father." That never was my contention. I said that savages had these ideas, overrun by mythical parasitic plants. Mr. Hartland does, however, see a chance of debasing Our Father. "The Kurnai have another Supreme Being—if indeed he be not the same—who is called Brewin." Two Supreme Beings? "There was no restriction against the women's knowing about him." They do not know Mungan-ngaur. So it looks as if Brewin were identical with Mungan-ngaur. "No women would ever call Brewin 'Father,' for he is looked on as very malignant," whereas Mungan-ngaur is benevolent, and Brewin, Mr. Hartland thinks, is only the bad aspect of Mungan-ngaur. Now, no women call Mungan-ngaur anything at all. It is the Coast Murring women who call Daramulun "Papang" or "Father." The fact is that, till initiated, Mr. Howitt knew nothing of Our Father in Kurnai. He only knew the fiend Brewin, as the women do. One might as well argue that the Deity = Satan, or that Kiehtun = Hobamock, as that Mungan-ngaur = Brewin, though Brewin does live in the sky, has a wife, sends disease, and gives magical power. There are four or five cases of the bad, as opposed to the good, Being in Australia; any one who pleases may attribute the belief to missionary influence. Before Mr. Howitt was initiated and knew Mungan-ngaur, he seems to have regarded Brewin as the Supreme Being of the Kurnai. Here I followed him in Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 1887. Now he knows better—and so do we. It was enough to blacken Daramulun by attributes assigned to him in a Baiame country; we cannot have poor Mungan-ngaur mixed up with Brewin as "that untradesmanlike falsehood, 'the same concern.'" Let Mr. Hartland have patience