Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/335

Rh and the vague threat "he can see you and all you do down here" implies a fear of vengeance in case of offending him. There is no account, so far as I have read, of his connection, if any, with the mysteries, nor of anything in the shape of worship, even as much as the ritual utterance of his name. Of his "precepts," referred to by Mr. Lang (p. 315), I know nothing. Grotesque stories are told of Bunjil as "Creator," and of his marital relations and his brother Pal-ly-yan, or Boo-err-go-en (if these two are the same). I give one of these stories on a later page. According to another, though Bunjil had made men, it was left to Pal-ly-yan to make women, or rather to fish them out of a water-hole. The legends need not detain us; they are of the usual savage character.

But the great name by which Mr. Lang conjures is Mungan-ngaur, Our Father, revealed in the secret rites of the Kurnai, "a Being not defined as spirit, but immortal, and dwelling in heaven" (p. 196). Let me pause for a moment to observe that he lays great emphasis on the distinction between spirits and these alleged Supreme Beings. And he is right, if by spirit he mean human spirit, the ghost or manes of a dead man. There is nothing to show that many heathen gods were regarded as the ghosts of once living men; and there is much to show the contrary. But if he mean spirit in the more general sense, then we must demur. The idea of immateriality, which we attach to spirit, is foreign to the savage mind. Even ghosts of the dead are not regarded as wholly immaterial. They are beings less substantial perhaps (though not always) than living men, with greater power of changing their form, and of locomotion, appearing and disappearing in a marvellous way, but not of a kind quite disparate from matter. They suffer from cold and from hunger, unless their surviving