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If ever they come to abandon stone implements, while retaining their magic or religion, they will keep on using their stone churinga nanja. While I was studying these novel Australian facts, in the autumn of 1898, a friend, a distinguished member of Clan Diarmaid, passing by my window, in London, saw me, and came in.
For all that I know, a dweller in Dunbuie might have compasses, like the Lough Crew cairn artist. If I have established the parallelism between Arunta churinga nanja and the disputed Clyde "pendants," which Dr. Munro denies, we are reduced to one of two theories.
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.
He made a sketch of this object, from memory: if found in Central Australia it would have been reckoned a churinga nanja. I was naturally much interested in my friend's account of objects found in the Clyde estuary, which, as far as his description went, resembled in being archaically decorated the churinga nanja discovered by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen in Central Australia.
Munro, impugning the authenticity of one set of finds by Mr. Donnelly, in a pile-structure at Dumbuck, on the Clyde, near Dumbarton. I wrote to the Glasgow Herald, adducing the Australian churinga nanja as parallel to Mr. Donnelly's inscribed stones, and thus my share in the controversy began. What Dr. Munro and I then wrote may be passed over in this place. It was in July 1898, that Mr.
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.
They are: but I was speaking of Australian churinga nanja, of stone. "The Clyde amulets are," says Dr. But Dr. Let me put a crucial question. Are the archaic markings on the disputed objects better, or worse, or much on a level with the general run of such undisputably ancient markings on large rocks, cists, and cairns in Scotland? I think the art in both cases is on the same low level.
It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja spots the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for their re-incarnation.
They play a great part in the initiations and magic of Central Australia. Designs of the same class are incised, by the same Australian tribes, on stones of various shapes and sizes, usually portable, and variously shaped which are styled churinga nanja. The tribes are now in a "siderolithic" stage, using steel when they can get it, stone when they cannot.
During the interval between two re-incarnations the souls live in their nanja spots, or local totem-centres, which are always natural objects such as trees or rocks. Each totem-clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over the country.
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