Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/427

Rh in doing has been to observe and detect the significance of certain practices of the Australian tribes which have never been observed, or at least never understood, before.

At a certain time of the year, it appears, each totemistic tribe goes through elaborate ceremonies of a purely magical character for the purpose of promoting the growth and multiplication of the particular animal or plant, if it be one useful for food, with which the tribe is identified, or of antagonizing its evil effects if it be of a hurtful character. As "there is scarcely an object, animate or inanimate, to be found in the country occupied by the natives which does not give its name to some totemic group of individuals," the general scheme of things is pretty well looked after in the various ceremonies that are practiced by the different groups. Attention is here drawn to the essential difference between religion and magic, religion being an attempt to propitiate or conciliate the higher powers, while magic undertakes to coerce them. "To the magician," as Mr. Frazer observes, "it is a matter of indifference whether the cosmic powers are conscious or unconscious, spiritual or material; for in either case he imagines that he can force them by his enchantments to do his bidding." The ceremonies of the native Australians, as we have said, are wholly magical. They have the same kind of faith in their incantations and other strange performances that the modern man of science has in the preparations he makes for a physical experiment. The difference is that imagination or the crudest kind of symbolism has suggested the methods of the savage, while a careful scrutiny and comparison of facts has dictated those of the man of science. The proprium of the savage mind is an utter insensibility to evidence, or rather a lack of all power of conceiving what evidece is, and therefore a total incapacity for feeling any need of it. The scientific man, on the other hand, feels that he needs it every hour and every moment.

It may be interesting to quote the description given by Mr. Frazer, after Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, of the ceremonies performed by the men whose totem is the "witchetty grub," a creature much prized as an article of diet by the natives.

"The men of the witehetty-grub totem repair to a shallow cave in a ravine where lies a large block of quartzite, surrounded by some small rounded stones. The large block represents the full-grown grub; the small stones stand for the eggs. On reaching the cave the head man of the totem group begins to sing, while he taps the large block with a wooden trough, such as is used for scooping the earth out of burrows. All the other men at the same time tap it with twigs of a particular gum tree, chanting the while. The burden of their song is an invitation to the insect to go and lay eggs. Next, the leader takes up one of the smaller stones, representing an egg, and strikes each man in the stomach with it, saying, 'You have eaten much food,' after which he butts at the man's stomach with his forehead. … Ceremonies of the same sort are performed at ten different places. When the round has been completed the party returns home. Here, at some distance from the camp, a long structure of boughs has been got ready; it is designed to represent the chrysalis from which the full-grown insect emerges. Into this structure the men, each with the sacred design of the totem painted in red ochre and pipe clay on his body, enter and sing of the grub in the various stages of its development. After chanting thus for a while they shuffle out of the mock chrysalis one by one, with a gliding motion, singing all the time about the emergence of the real insect out of the real chrysalis, of