The Secret of the Totem

by Andrew Lang

We cannot therefore say in such cases, that the totem kins of phratriac names have vanished, because we do not know how the phratries were named; they may have had the names of two extant totem kins, but their names are lost.

(3) Again, there are Australian cases, as of the Urabunna and Dieri of Central Australia, in which the phratries have names—Matthurie and Kirarawa (Urabunna), or Matteri and Kararu (Dieri)—but these phratry names cannot be, or are not translated. Manifestly, then, the meaning of the names may be identical with names of extant totem kins in these phratries, may be names of obsolete or almost obsolete sacred meaning, originally denoting totems now recognised by other names in the everyday language of the tribe.

Confronted by the problem of the two apparently lost totem kins, those of the same names as the phratries, I conjectured that phratry names, now meaningless in the speech of the tribes where they appear, might be really identical in meaning with other names now denoting totem animals in the phratries. This conjecture proved to be correct, and I proceed to show how my conclusion was reached. The evidence, happily, is earlier than scientific discussion of the subject, and is therefore unbiassed.

So long ago as 1852 or 1853, Mr. C. G. N. Lockhart, in his Annual Report to the Government of New South Wales, recorded a myth of the natives on the Lower Darling River, which flows from the north into the Murray River, the boundary between New South Wales and Victoria.[7] The tribes had the phratries named by Mr. Lockhart Mookwara and Keelpara, usually written Mukwara and Kilpara. These were the usual intermarrying exogamous phratries. According to the natives, Mukwara and Kilpara were the two wives of a prehistoric black fellow, "the Eves of the Adam of the Darling," Mr. Lockhart says—like the Hebrew Lilith and Eve, wives of Adam, Lilith being a Serpent woman. (If Rachael and Leah are really animal names, they may be old phratry names, though I think it highly improbable.)

The children of wife Mukwara married those of wife Kilpara, and vice versa, the children taking the mother's name. Next, says the myth, as in the theories of Dr. Durkheim and Mr. Frazer, the two stocks, Mukwara and Kilpara, subdivided into totem kins, as Kilpara into Emu, Duck, &c., Mukwara into Kangaroo, Opossum, &c. (There is perhaps no modern theory of the origin of totemism, including my own, which has not been somewhere, and to some extent, anticipated by the mythical guesses of savages. The Port Fairy tribes, in their myth, take my view, and make the phratries arise in the male ancestor and his wife, two Cockatoos of various species; the totem kins were brought in by the sons of the two Cockatoos marrying women from a distance, of other animal parentage, their children keeping the maternal names, as Duck, Snipe, and so on. This myth is well inspired, for once!) In the passage of Mr. Lockhart, as cited by Mr. Curr, he does not give the translation of the names Mukwara and Kilpara. But in Mr. Brough Smyth's Aborigines of Victoria, a compilation of evidence published in 1878, we find another myth. "The natives of the northern parts of Victoria" believe that the makers of the world were "two beings that had severally the forms of the Crow and the Eagle Hawk." The Eagle Hawk was Mak-quarra; the Crow is Kil-parra.[8]

Again, Mr. Bulmer writes: "The blacks of the Murray"—the river severing northern Victoria from New South Wales—"are divided into two classes" (phratries), "the Mak-quarra, or Eagle, and the Kilparra, or Crow. If the man be Mak-quarra, the woman must be Kil-parra," by phratry.[9]

One myth (1852-53) explains Mukwara and Kilpara as wives of one man, and mothers of the phratries. The other (1878) says that Mukwara was a cosmic Eagle Hawk, Kilpara a cosmic Crow. They were on hostile terms, like Ormuzd and Ahriman; like the Thlinket phratry-founders, Raven and Wolf; and like the name-giving founders of phratries in New Britain, Te Kabinana, the author of good, and Te Kovuvura, the author of evil.[10] Eagle Hawk and Crow, Kilpara and Mukwara, in one of the myths, made peace, one condition being that "the Murray blacks should be divided into two classes" (phratries) called Mukwara and Kilpara, Eagle Hawk and Crow.[11]

Crow and Eagle Hawk, then, were apparently names of hostile groups, which, making connubium, became allied phratries.

The evidence thus is that Mukwara meant Eagle Hawk, that Kilpara meant Crow, in the language of some tribe which, so far, I have not been able to identify in glossaries. Probably the tribe is now extinct. But these two names for Eagle Hawk and Crow now denote two phratries in many widely separated tribes, which, in common use, employ various quite different names for Eagle Hawk and Crow.

Now the point is that, in Mukwara phratry (Eagle Hawk), we almost always find, under another name, Eagle Hawk as a totem kin; and in Kilpara, Crow, we find, under another name, Crow as a totem kin. In many other cases, we cannot translate the phratry names, but, by a fortunate chance, the meanings of Kilpara and Mukwara have been preserved, and we see that, as in America, so also in Australia, phratries contain totem kins representing the phratry animal-name givers.