Note 1 — Chapter XIV · Creation Myths and the God and Goddess Cults

In outlying areas, like Australia and Oceania, are found not only “primitive beliefs”, but definite burial customs that have a long history elsewhere, including cremation and even mummification. “You get the whole bag of tricks in Australia”, the late Andrew Lang once declared to the writer when contending that certain beliefs and customs found in Egypt, Babylonia, India, and Europe were “natural products of the primitive mind”. But is it likely that such a custom as mummification should have “arisen independently” in Australasia? Let us take, for instance, the case of the mummy from the Torres Straits, which is preserved in the Mackay Museum in the University of Sydney. It was examined by Professor G. Elliot Smith, who, during his ten years’ occupancy of the Chair of Anatomy in the Government School of Medicine in Cairo, had unique opportunities of studying Ancient Egyptian surgery as revealed by the mummies preserved in Gizeh museum. When he examined the Papuan mummy at Sydney he found that undeniable Egyptian methods of a definite period in Egyptian history had been employed. He communicated his discovery to the Anthropological Section of the British Association in Melbourne in 1914, and, as an anatomist, was astonished to hear Professor Myres contending that it seemed to him natural that people should want to preserve their dead! “If”, Professor Elliot Smith has written, “Professor Myers had known anything of the history of anatomy he would have realized that the problem of preserving the body was one of extreme difficulty which for long ages had exercised the most civilized peoples, not only of antiquity, but also of modern times. In Egypt, where the natural conditions favouring the successful issue of attempts to preserve the body were largely responsible for the possibility of such embalming, it took more than seventeen centuries of constant practice and experimentation to reach the stage and to acquire the methods exemplified in the Torres Straits mummies.”1 Arm-chair theories vanish like mist when the light of scientific evidence is released.