Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/404

 72 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. BOOKS.

The Native Tribes of Central Australia. By Baldwin Spencer and

F. J. Gillen. London : Macmillan & Co. 1899. Pp- x > 671.

With this remarkable and epoch-making work comes a flood of long- desired illumination. Both authors are members of the important Arunta tribe, and one has spent the greater part of the last twenty years in the centre of the continent. In 1896-97 they witnessed at Alice Springs a series of ceremonies which occupied more than three months. The desert country is inhabited by tribes distributed into small local groups, each of which takes its name from some one animal or plant, and each of which has its sacred storehouse in a cleft or cave, where are concealed the sacred objects. At intervals of time are performed ceremonies designed to multi- ply the animal or plant of the group to which the performers belong. It is with regard to the philosophy connected with these groups that the book is especially instructive.

As with North American Indians, traditional history begins with a period at which the land is supposed to be inhabited by mythical ancestors con- ceived as animal or plant men, more powerful than their living descendants, and who are conceived as inconsistently fluctuating between human and animal characteristics. To this age is given the name of Alcheringa. The ancestors, in course of migrations, carried with them amulets, sacred stones called Churinga ; where they went into the ground, at the term of their activity, the spirit part remained in these amulets, while a rock or plant also rose to replace the body ; in the shrine so formed, a number of other Churinga were deposited. The spirits present in these holy places are disposed to take second birth, and, the idea of natural conception being unknown, it is conceived that the first perception by a woman of the future birth of a child is due to the entrance into her person of a spirit, whose totem is determined by the spot ; for if the Oknanikilla belongs, for instance, to spirits of emu men, then the child will be an emu, without regard to the totem of its mother. The tribe being divided into two exogamous groups, the child, among the Arunta, will follow the class of its father ; but the Alcheringa men of the totem will have belonged mainly to one or other of the two groups, and the class chiefly represented will have the first chance in the choice of headman. The child is therefore the reincarnation of an ancestor who was also animal, plant, cloud, water, or fire, the native mind having no difficulty in conceiving that the spirit embodied in any of these may be incarnated in a human body. (On the other hand, as may be observed, the essence of the beast or element is thought of as human, and may and does appear and act in human form, this being the mental root of polytheism, a method of imagination reverting to the most primitive mental conditions.)

When the spirit is born as a babe, he has no further use for the Churinga

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