PLATE XXXVI
1. An ordinary performer in the Ladjia or yam ceremony, wearing the “tdela” head-gear.
2. The impersonator of the “Kuta Knaninja” in the Ladjia or yam ceremony.
These occurrences must not be confused with the mixed intercourses which occasionally take place at the climax of friendly corrobborees to celebrate the meeting of neighbouring tribes. In this case we merely have to do with an inter-sexual embrace following an animated orgy, in which those members of both tribes standing in the general relationship of husband to wife take part.
The Dieri have a number of long cylindro-conical stones in their possession which are supposed to temporarily contain the male element of certain ancestral spirits now residing in the sky as their recognized deities. These are on an average about fifteen inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, circular in transverse section and pointed at one end. The old men have these phallus in their custody, and are very unwilling to let them get out of their reach because they believe the virility of the tribe is dependent upon the preservation of the stones. Should one of them be accidentally lost, the mishap is calculated as little short of disastrous; should a stranger find the object, the old men maintain that evil will come to him, and if he keeps it he will die. The stone is used principally during religious ceremonies connected with sex-worship, but it is also produced during some of the initiation practices. After he has submitted to the “gruesome rite” in his initiation, a novice is required to carry the stone, firmly pressing it against his body with his arm, until he is overcome by the exhaustion occasioned by the painful ordeal. By so doing, the young fellow’s virile powers are supposed to receive considerable stimulation through the agency of the phallus he carries. The object drops into the sand beside him; and, when he recovers, he returns to the men’s camp without it. Two of the old men thereupon track the lad’s outward course and recover their sacred stone to take it back to a place of safety.
The tribes inhabiting the great stony plains of central Australia and those adjoining them, and also the Victoria Desert tribes, are occasionally in possession of nodular ironstone and concretionary sandstone formations, of the “natural freak” kind, which simulate the membrum virile to a marked degree. These are believed to have been left them by a deified ancestor and are kept by the old men as a sacred legacy; they answer in every way the purpose of an artificially constructed phallus.
Closely allied to the phallic significance given to natural pillars of rock and smaller imitative specimens, is the idea that natural clefts in the earth represent a female character. Killalpaninna is the name of a small lake lying about fifty miles east of Lake Eyre in central Australia, it being the contracted form of the two words, “killa” and “wulpanna,” which stand for that typical of woman. It is the conviction of the Dieri tribe that when a person, especially one stricken with senility or enfeebled by sickness, at a certain hour passes from the water of the lake into the open, and is not seen doing so by the women, he is re-born and rejuvenated, or at any rate cured of his decrepitness. In this sense Killa-Wulpanna has from time immemorial been an aboriginal Mecca, to which pilgrims have found their way from far and wide to seek remedy and solace at the great matronal chasm which has such divine powers to impart. This fact is of particular interest, since a native, generally speaking, is superstitious about entering any strange water, and does so very reluctantly, thinking that, by doing so, the evil spirit will foist disease upon him through the medium of the water.
A singular stone exists in Ellery Creek, a short distance south of the MacDonnell Ranges, which is called “Arrolmolbma.” It was at this place that a tribal ancestor, named “Rukkutta,” a long time ago met a young gin, “Indorida,” and captured her. The stone at the present time shows a cleft and two depressions which are supposed to be the knee-marks of Rukkutta. On account of the intimacy which took place, the stone is believed to be teeming with rattappa, which entered by the cleft. The ancient Arunndta men used to make this stone the object of special veneration, and during the sacred ceremonies which took place at the spot, they used to produce carved slabs of stone they called “Altjerra Kutta” (i.e. the Supreme Spirit’s Stone or Tjuringa). These inspirited slabs of stone, being of the two sexes, were allowed to repeat the indulgent act of Rukkutta and Indorida, while the natives themselves rubbed red ochre over the sacred stone of Arrolmolba, and engaged in devotion. The act of rubbing red ochre over the surface of the stone was supposed to incite the sexual instinct of the men and to vivify the virile principle of the tribe. By this performance the men believed they took from the pregnant rock the embryonic rattappa which in the invisible form entered the wombs of the gins and subsequently came to the world as the young representatives of the tribe they called “kadji kurreka.”
Among the cave drawings of Australia, designs are here and there met with depicting scenes from ceremonies having to do with phallicism and other sex-worship. In the picture reproduced from the Pigeon Hole district on the Victoria River ([Fig. 9]), one notices a man of the Kukadja type who was named “Mongarrapungja” in the act of dancing around a sacred fire with an ancestral female. The organ of the Kukadja, it will be observed, passes into the flame, whence a column of smoke is rising to find its way to the body of a gin which is drawn in outline above the dancers. Here we have the representation of a traditional ceremony associating the Kukadja’s phallus with the impregnating medium supplied by fire, which, we have already learned, may be looked for in the column of smoke.
