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Updated: June 27, 2025
Spencer and Gillen, it is evident, would not claim to have done more than interpret the external signs of a high individuality on the part of these prominent natives. It still remains a rare and almost unheard-of thing for an anthropologist to be on such friendly terms with a savage as to get him to talk intimately about himself, and reveal the real man within.
I was once entrusted with a charm stone used in the nineteenth century for the healing of cattle in the Highlands. An acquaintance of mine, a Mac by the mother's side, inherited this heirloom with the curious box patched with wicker-work, which was its Ark. It was exactly of the shape of a "stone churinga of the Arunta tribe," later reproduced by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.
In the same way, if dealing with ornament, I would derive the spirals, volutes, and concentric circles of Mycenaean gold work, from the identical motives, on the oldest incised rocks and kists of our Islands, of North and South America, and of the tribes of Central Australia, recently described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, and Mr. Carnegie.
Stretch, who took great pains to make clear to me the fundamental principles, from which I have worked out the various combinations. I have tried to arrange these laws and the relationships resulting from them in an intelligible form, and have been greatly aided by a paper by Mr. Gillen, published in the "Horn Scientific Expedition," on the McDonnell Range tribes.
Spencer and Gillen on the Central tribes, or the no less illuminating volume of Howitt on the natives of the South-eastern region; whilst for North America there are many excellent monographs to choose from amongst those issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution.
Thus Spencer and Gillen describe the Nathagura or fire-ceremony of the Warramunga tribe of Central Australia, a festival taken part in by both sexes, in which all the ordinary rules of social life are broken, a kind of Saturnalia in which, however, there is no sexual license, for sexual license is, it need scarcely be said, no essential part of the orgy, even when the orgy lightens the burden of sexual constraints.
And this perhaps was a wise line to take. A taboo on promiscuity had to be created, and for this purpose any current prejudice could be made use of. Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66. See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia. The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See p. 214 of that book. With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different complexion.
There are some doubtful cases for example, certain Australian tribes reported on by Spencer and Gillen, among whom it is difficult to discover any definite religious feeling: they offer no sacrifices or petitions, and appear to recognize no personal relations with any supernatural Power, beyond the belief that the spirits of the dead are active in their midst, causing sickness, death, and birth; nor is there any sign that they have lost earlier more definite beliefs.
No human being wears any churinga "as an ornament!" Nobody says that they do. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, moreover, speak of "a long stone churinga," and of "especially large ones" made by the mythical first ancestors of the race.
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