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Macdonald says about a Being among the Yaos, analogous to the Dendid of the Dinkas, or the Darumulun of Australia, or the Huron Ahone. Yet analysis detects, in Mr. Macdonald's report, copious traces of such a Being, though Mr. Macdonald himself believes in ancestor-worship as the Source of the local religion.
Howitt instinctively distinguished between the mythology and the religion of Darumulun. This distinction the secrecy about the religion, the candour about the mythology is essential, and accounts for our ignorance about the inner religious beliefs of early races. Mr. Howitt himself knew little till he was initiated. The grandfather of Mr.
In fact, granting a relatively pure starting-point, degeneration from it must accompany every step of civilisation, to a certain distance. Unlike Semitic gods, Darumulun receives no sacrifice. The Kurnai ghosts 'were believed to live upon plants, which are not offered to them. Chill ghosts, unfed by men, would come to waning camp-fires and batten on the broken meats.
Indeed, he goes on at once to remark that 'Darumulun was not, it seems to me, everywhere thought a malevolent being, but he was dreaded as one who could severely punish the trespasses committed against these tribal ordinances and customs whose first institution is ascribed to him. To punish transgressions of his law is not the essence of a malevolent being.
Now, it is undeniable that Jehovah, at a certain period of Hebrew history, had become degraded and anthropomorphized, far below Darumulun, and Puluga, and Pachacamac, and Ahone, as conceived of in their purest form, and in the high mood of savage mysteries which yet contain so much that is grotesque. But our knowledge of the Fuegians is lamentably scanty.
Darumulun is thus not capable of degenerating into 'a local god, as Baal, or lord of the land, because this 'involves a series of ideas unknown to the primitive life of the savage huntsman, like the widely spread Murring tribes.
It is logically conceivable that savages may have worshipped deities like Baiame and Darumulun before they had evolved the notion that Tom, Dick, or Harry has a separable soul, capable of surviving his bodily decease.
The proof therefore rests on the anthropomorphised pre-prophetic accounts, and on the ritual, of Jehovah. But man naturally 'anthropises' his deities: he does not thereby demonstrate that they were once ghosts. But we have shown that among the lowest races neither are ghosts worshipped by sacrifice, nor does the Supreme Being, Darumulun or Puluga, receive food offerings.
Nor could Darumulun be tied down to a place in Semitic fashion, first by manifesting himself there, therefore by receiving an altar of sacrifice there, and in the end a sanctuary, for Darumulun receives no sacrifice at all. Again, the scene of the Bora could not become a permanent home of Darumulun, because, when the rites are over, the effigy of the god is scrupulously destroyed.
To make a nation, several tribes must unite. Each has its god, and the nation is apt to receive them all, equally, into its Pantheon. Thus, if worshippers of Baiame, Pundjel, and Darumulun coalesced into a nation, we might find all three gods living together in a new polytheism.
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