Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/322

294 passes to the Australians, who, he rightly says, "of all races now extant .... are probably lowest in culture, and .... nearest to the primitive model. They have neither metals, bows, pottery, agriculture, nor fixed habitations; and no traces of higher culture have anywhere been found above or in the soil of the continent" (p. 189). "Their best religious ideas," we learn, "are imparted in their ancient and secret mysteries," which, let me add, are celebrated with horrible cruelty and worse than beastly filthiness. Before examining the teaching given to the initiate in the mysteries, Mr. Lang quotes and discusses Mr. Howitt's account of the "Supreme Spirit" of various tribes. The Murring tribes give the name of Daramulun (with certain dialectal variations) to a being who "taught the Murring all the arts they knew: he instituted the ceremonies of Initiation of Youths; he made the original Mudji (or bull-roarer), ordered the animal names to be assumed by men, and directed what rules should be observed as to the food permitted or forbidden to certain persons."

Without mixing up Daramulun with the "Supreme Spirit" of other tribes, let us first see what we know of him alone as the conception formed by the Murring of the moral, eternal, omniscient Creator and Judge. "He was not, it seems to me," writes Mr. Howitt, "everywhere thought to be a malevolent being, but he was dreaded as one who could severely punish the trespasses against those tribal ordinances and customs whose first institution is ascribed to him." He "watched the youths from the sky, prompt to punish, by sickness or death, the breach of his ordinances." Upon these passages Mr. Lang remarks that "to punish transgressions of his law is not the essence