Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
The methods commonly employed are mimic representations of rainfall or of a storm. The Australian Arunta have a rain clan whose function is to bring the desired supply by nonsacred dancing festivals and sacred ceremonies. A more advanced method is to dip a stone, as rain-god, into a stream. Certain American tribes assign the duty of rain making to secret societies or to priests.
See Taboo and Perils of the Soul, pp. 207 sqq. The custom of killing a man by pointing a bone or stick at him, while the sorcerer utters appropriate curses, is common among the tribes of Central Australia; but amongst them there seems to be no objection to place the bone or stick on the ground; on the contrary, an Arunta wizard inserts the bone or stick in the ground while he invokes death and destruction on his enemy.
These grow with every generation, receiving such additions as fancy and reflection dictate, and gradually taking on literary form. In the territory of the Australian Arunta every stone is connected with some incident in the careers of the mythical ancestors, and the stories taken together form the legendary history of the origin of customs.
The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments.
There is a belief in spirit haunted trees, as among the Arunta, and there is a form of the Arunta myth of the 'Dream Time, the age of pristine evolution. The Euahlayi thus present a mixture of ideas and usages which appears to be somewhat peculiar and deserving of closer study than it has received. Mr. Howitt himself refers to the tribe very seldom.
Moreover, the women of the Euahlayi have some knowledge of, and some means of, mystic access to Byamee, though they call him by another name. Byamee, in the first place, is to the Euahlayi what the 'Alcheringa' or 'Dream time' is to the Arunta.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking