Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/332

304 does not appear. The instruction is certainly given in a peculiar manner, and is mixed up with much that cannot be fairly called ethical.

Among the Wiraijuri, Baiame is said to have his camp above the clouds, where he is visited by the medicine-men. They ascend astride a thread, and enter at a place which keeps "opening and shutting very quickly," like the Clashing Rocks of the Argonautic Expedition and many other mythical doors, "On the other side," says an eye-witness, "we saw Baiame sitting in his camp. He was a very great old man with a long beard. He sate with his legs under him [squatting in native fashion], and from his shoulders extended two great quartz crystals to the sky above him. There were also numbers of the boys of Baiame and of his people, who are birds and beasts." It is in some such way that the Wiraijuri wizard receives his power; and the gift of this power in dreams is almost all the earthly labour now undertaken by Baiame. But evidently in his own camp he still carries on his family life, begetting boys and ruling his people, who are celestial birds and beasts. As a moral being, all we know of him is that he slew Daramulun, not for his fraud and cruelty, but because he himself lost through him so many of his young men; that he instituted the Burbung, including, of course, the moral lessons we have yet to deal with; and that he commanded the men to continue to make " the women and uninitiated " believe the fable that Daramulun actually burnt and restored to life the boys who were taken away for initiation. Omniscient he certainly is not; for Daramulun deceived him, nor did he learn the truth until in an entirely human way he had got it out of the mouths of eye-witnesses.

Turning now to Bunjil, or Pundjel, the "Supreme Being" of the Kulin tribes, it is satisfactory to find that he has a