Note 105.2 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

Again, so far from the Arunta medicine-men being practitioners of anything analogous to modern science, they are initiated by, and their power is derived from, the spirits. These spirits are believed to put the candidate to death, to carry him down into their abode, and there to take out his internal organs, replacing them with a new set, planting in his body a supply of magical crystals by which all his subsequent wonders will be performed, and then bringing him to life again. He remains, however, in a condition of insanity for some days. It is true that an imitation of this process can be performed by medicine-men of flesh and blood; but candidates thus initiated have a lower repute (save apparently among the Warramunga) than those initiated directly by the spirits. The crystals are in any case the home and symbol of the magician’s powers. They are in fact full of mana. If they be lost, the magician ceases to be a magician, and the crystals themselves return to the spirits. All over Australia, so far as we know, the same influence is attributed to them.105.2 On the eastern side of the continent, where something like a tribal All-Father is believed in, he is regarded, like Odin, as the mightiest of magicians, and the crystals are, as well as the bull-roarer, among his special attributes. Let me observe too in passing that it is not a little significant that, as in the witchcraft of Europe and Africa, portions of dead bodies are in great request in Australia for magical purposes. The “pointing bone,” to which I referred just now, is part of a dead man’s leg or arm. A portion of his personality inheres in it. Consequently, even before it is “sung,” it is endowed with his mana, which the singing only enhances and directs in its course.106.1 For the same reason human fat and a dead man’s hair are important parts of the Australian native’s magical apparatus.