(1) J. A. I., xiii. pp. 440-459.
(2) Ibid., xxi. p. 294.
(3) Ibid., xiii. p. 194.
For the Wiraijuri, IN THEIR MYSTERIES, tell a myth of cannibal conduct of Daramulun's, and of deceit and failure of knowledge in Baiame.(1) Of this I was unaware, or neglected it, for I explicitly said that I followed Mr. Howitt's account, where no such matter is mentioned. Mr. Howitt, in fact, described the Mysteries of the Coast Murring, while the narrator of the low myths, Mr. Matthews, described those of a remote tribe, the Wiraijuri, with whom Daramulun is not the chief, but a subordinate person. How Mr. Matthews' friends can at once hold that Daramulun was "destroyed" by Baiame (their chief deity), and also that Daramulun's voice is heard at their rites, I don't know.(2) Nor do I know why Mr. Hartland takes the myth of a tribe where Daramulun is "the evil spirit who rules the night,"(3) and introduces it as an argument against the belief of a distant tribe, where, by Mr. Howitt's account, Daramulun is not an evil spirit, but "the master" of all, whose abode is above the sky, and to whom are attributed powers of omnipotence and omnipresence, or, at any rate, the power "to do anything and to go anywhere.... To his direct ordinances are attributed the social and moral laws of the community."(4) This is not "an evil spirit"! When Mr. Hartland goes for scandals to a remote tribe of a different creed that he may discredit the creed of the Coast Murring, he might as well attribute to the Free Kirk "the errors of Rome". But Mr. Hartland does it!(5) Being "cunning of fence" he may reply that I also spoke loosely of Wiraijuri and Coast Murring as, indifferently, Daramulunites. I did, and I was wrong, and my critic ought not to accept but to expose my error. The Wiraijuri Daramulun, who was annihilated, yet who is "an evil spirit that rules the night," is not the Murring guardian and founder of recognised ethics.
(1) J. A. I., xxv. p. 297.
(2) Ibid., May, 1895, p. 419.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., xiii. pp. 458, 459.
(5) Folk-Lore, ix., No. iv., p. 299.
But, in the Wiraijuri mysteries, the master, Baiame, deceives the women as to the Mysteries! Shocking to US, but to deceive the women as to these arcana, is, to the Australian mind in general, necessary for the safety of the world. Moreover, we have heard of a lying spirit sent to deceive prophets in a much higher creed. Finally, in a myth of the Mystery of the Wiraijuri, Baiame is not omniscient. Indeed, even civilised races cannot keep on the level of these religious conceptions, and not to keep on that level is—mythology. Apollo, in the hymn to Hermes, sung on a sacred occasion, needs to ask an old vine-dresser for intelligence. Hyperion "sees all and hears all," but needs to be informed, by his daughters, of the slaughter of his kine. The Lord, in the Book of Job, has to ask Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Now for the sake of dramatic effect, now from pure inability to live on the level of his highest thought, man mythologises and anthropomorphises, in Greece or Israel, as in Australia.