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Updated: June 8, 2025
These Arunta ancestors, notwithstanding their half-bestial forms, are represented as acting in all regards like human beings, and as having planned a complete system of tribal organization, but no religious worship is offered them they figure only in sociogonic myths and in the determination of the totemic status of newborn children.
In North and South America the bull roarer, on the other hand, is used, not to avert, but magically to produce thunder and lightning. Among the Kaitish thunder is caused by the churinga of their "sky dweller," Atnatu. Wherever the toy is used for a superstitious purpose, it is, so far, churinga, and, so far, modern Aberdeenshire had the same churinga irula as the Arunta.
See Ernest Crawley's Mystic Rose, ch. xiii, pp. 310 and 313: "In certain tribes of Central Africa both boys and girls after initiation must as soon as possible have intercourse." Initiation being not merely preliminary to, but often ACTUALLY marriage. The same among Kaffirs, Congo tribes, Senegalese, etc. Also among the Arunta of Australia.
Joseph Anderson compares these to "similar pebbles painted with a red pigment" which M. Piette found in the cavern of Mas d'Azil, of which the relics are, in part at least, palaeolithic, or "mesolithic," and of dateless antiquity. Arthur Bernard Cook suggests that the pebbles of Mas d'Azil may correspond to the stone churinga nanja of the Arunta; a few of which appear to be painted, not incised.
My private opinion as to the meaning of the archaic marks and the Clyde objects which bear them, has, in part by my own fault, been misunderstood by Dr. Munro. He bases an argument on the idea that I suppose the disputed "pendants" to have had, in Clydesdale, precisely the same legendary, customary, and magical significance as the stone churinga of the Arunta tribe in Australia.
The term churinga, "sacred," is used by the Arunta to denote not only the stone churinga nanja, a local peculiarity of the Arunta and Kaitish, but also the decorated and widely diffused elongated wooden slats called "Bull Roarers" by the English. These are swung at the end of a string, and produce a whirring roar, supposed to be the voice of a supernormal being, all over Australia and elsewhere.
+639+. In this class of vaguely conceived creators or transformers we may place the Central Australian Arunta ancestors, who embodied the idea of the identity of beasts and human beings, and are the originators of all the arts and institutions of the tribes; they established the totemic groups and the ceremonies, and, in the developed myth, perpetuate their existence by entering the bodies of women and being born as human beings.
The Arunta of Central Australia forbid menstruous women to gather the irriakura bulbs, which form a staple article of diet for both men and women. They believe that were a woman to break this rule, the supply of bulbs would fail.
But here the resemblance ceases the Arunta child's totem is determined for him before his birth, but a man chooses his personal guardian for himself, and joins others having the same guardian, not in a clan but in a secret society.
Munro by an unguarded expression in a letter to the Society of Scottish Antiquaries, saying that, if the disputed objects were genuine, they implied the survival, on Clyde, "of a singularly archaic set of ritual and magical ideas," namely those peculiar to the Arunta and Kaitish tribes of Central Australia. But that was a slip of the pen, merely.
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