Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/70

44 cruelty. Of filthiness (except in dances to deter from vice) I know no proof, even among the Arunta, at these ceremonies. For promiscuity like what the fathers attribute to Greek mysteries, and heathen apologists to the Christians, the Fijians were available cases (or some of them), and their rites were given, not to Tui Laga, but to ancestral spirits, who, in my theory, succeed and supersede such beings as Mungan-ngaur. That such iniquities occur in Australia I do not dispute, but do they often occur at the Bora? I may incidentally remark that the retreat to the hills of each Dorian youth with an older companion seems to me analogous to the retreat of the Australian boy with his Kabo, or mystagogue. But the Greeks put an interpretation on it suited to their morals, though reprehended in those of Australia (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xiii., p. 450).

I have ever maintained that whether ghosts preceded such beings as Mungan-ngaur in evolution, whether low myth preceded high belief, or vice versa, we cannot historically know. But I have as good a right to a guess as my opponents have to a prehistoric "glimpse." They can have their prehistoric "glimpses," I have my conjecture. To me the mental faculties required for the conception of Mungan-ngaur do not seem loftier than those demanded for the very abstract speculations which lead up to the conception of a common ghost—unless actual ghosts were often seen, which might account for a belief in them. But this is Psychical Research. Again, as to myth, is it more likely that men first conceived of a low, polygamous, immoral medicine-man, and later, said that he, of all people, was guardian of conduct and maker of things, the enemy of the vices he practised; or is it more likely that, having conceived of a good, kind Maker, men proved unable to live up to the idea, and degraded it by humorous fancy? That man can do so is proved by the