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Updated: June 5, 2025
Thus in all of the great geographical areas the bull-roarer is found, and that without reckoning in analogous implements like the so-called "buzz," which cover further ground, for instance, the eastern coastlands of Asia. Are we to postulate many independent origins, or else far-reaching transportations by migratory peoples, by the American Indians and the negroes, for example?
There are students who would found on this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere.
Both Greeks and savages employ the bull-roarer, both bedaub the initiated with dirt or with white paint or chalk. As to the meaning of the latter very un-Aryan practice, one has no idea. It is only certain that war parties of Australian blacks bedaub themselves with white clay to alarm their enemies in night attacks.
In Australia, according to Howitt and Fison, the bull-roarer is regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then answered me in undertones. The chief peculiarity in connection with the turndun is that women may never look upon it.
The former for no obvious reason enables him to throw his spear extraordinarily far. These, then, are in themselves "medicine." There is "virtue" in, or behind, them. Is, then, to attribute "virtue" the same thing, necessarily, as to attribute vitality? Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarer inevitably thought of as alive? Or are they, as a matter of course, endowed with soul or spirit?
There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object. The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in many and widely separated lands.
Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel Artemis. But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with mud and the use of the bull-roarer.
It is found, always as a sacred instrument, employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in Australia, in New Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as we have seen, it is a peasant-boy's plaything in England. A number of questions are naturally suggested by the bull-roarer.
"Crown him with flowers!" Tu-Kila-Kila said; and a female attendant, absolved from the terror of the bull-roarer by the god's command, brought forward a great garland of crimson hibiscus, which she flung around the victim's neck and shoulders. "Lay his head on the sacred stone block of our fathers," Tu-Kila-Kila went on, in an easy tone of command, waving his hand gracefully.
But it is clear that Servius was only guessing; and he offers other explanations, among them that the vannus was a crate to hold offerings, primitias frugum. We have studied the bull-roarer in Australia, we have caught a glimpse of it in England. Its existence on the American continent is proved by letters from New Mexico, and by a passage in Mr.
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