Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/509

VIII The Alcheringa is the name applied to the far-distant past, with which the earliest traditions of the Arunta tribe deal, and in the Alcheringa lived ancestors who, in the native mind, are so intimately associated with the animals and plants the name of which they bear, that an Alcheringa man of, say, the kangaroo totem, may be sometimes spoken of either as man-kangaroo, or as a kangaroo-man.

Going back to this far-away time, we find ourselves in

the midst of semi-human creatures endowed with powers not possessed by their living descendants, and inhabiting the country which is now inhabited by the tribe. The traditions recognise four more or less distant periods in the Alcheringa. During the first of these, men and women were created; in the second, the rite of circumcision by means of the stone knife, in place of the fire-stick, was introduced; in the third, the rite of Arilta, or subincision was brought in; and in the fourth, the present organisation and marriage system.

Every individual is supposed to be the reincarnation of