Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/269

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August, 1908, a woman died at a small farm near Washfield, in North Devon. I passed the house a few minutes after the funeral party had left it, and noticed that, quite contrary to custom, every door and window was wide open. On enquiry I was told that this was very frequently done in the neighbourhood, not for sanitary purposes, but because it is "done everywhere." However, at the next funeral I saw in that parish, not a single door or window was opened.

I am happy to be able to agree with Mr. N. W. Thomas in thinking that Messrs. Spencer and Gillen and Mr. Strehlow do not differ as to Arunta ideas and customs, but are merely describing "local differences of considerable magnitude," which actually exist in language as well as in belief. Mr. Thomas says, "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" (which work magic for the totems) "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." Indeed, among Mr. Strehlow's branch of the Arunta, each man and woman has a hereditary totem, inherited from the mother. In the same way the maternal totem is very highly regarded by several tribes north of the Arunta, who, unlike the Arunta, inherit the paternal totem. If we suppose that the Arunta once inherited the totem, as the northern tribes must have done, in the maternal line, then we can see how the rise among them of the doctrine of reincarnation of local totem spirits thrust into the background the maternal totem, which is still inherited by Mr. Strehlow's people, and by them called altjira (sacred). It is the combination of the doctrine