Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/146

126 The present section contains Loritja sagas and märchen, a section, twenty pages long, on the totemic ideas of the Arunta and Loritja, and a shorter one on the churinga of these two tribes.

One of the most interesting features of the present report is the clearness with which local variations in belief are set forth; in a note on the religious ideas of the Arunta, based on Mr. Strehlow's letters to me, I suggested that this local variation might explain some of the contradictions between the data supplied by Spencer and Gillen and those with which I was dealing. The present memoir confirms the view that local differences of considerable magnitude exist, not only in belief, but also in social organisation (pp. 1, 3).

Perhaps the most important point, however, is the restatement of the totemistic beliefs. An article in Globus (91, 288) suggested that the Arunta connected the totem with food eaten by the mother; this is now shown to be erroneous; children come into the world in three ways: (1) a child, fully formed, enters the mother's body from a spray of mistletoe or a rock; (2) a totemic ancestor throws his namatuna (small bullroarer) at a woman, and it is transformed in her body into a child; or (3) a totemic ancestor enters her body and is reborn as a light-haired child: this rebirth only occurs once in the existence of each totemic ancestor.

But an individual is connected not only with a personal totem, acquired in one of the three ways just mentioned; a Loritja also respects his mother's totem, though an Arunta may eat it. The question naturally arises "which came first?"; if we suppose that the personal totem of the Arunta is analogous to the personal totem of other areas in Australia and elsewhere, that the societies have been formed among the Arunta by those who owned the same personal totem, and that these societies have overshadowed the totemism which is hereditary in the female line, we have perhaps the key to much that is mysterious in the totemism of the Arunta.

It is not quite clear from the text whether it is the "personal totem" of his mother which he inherits, for Strehlow writes "das durch seine Mutter auf ihn vererbt ist," which implies that the mother has in her turn got it from her mother.