On the evening of the day which succeeded the construction of the emblematic mound the old men who had made the emblem said they had heard the Wollunqua talking, and that he was pleased with what had been done and was sending them rain. What they took for the voice of the Wollunqua was thunder rumbling in the distance. No rain fell, but a few days later thunder was again heard rolling afar off and a heavy bank of clouds lay low on the western horizon. The old men now said that the Wollunqua was growling because the remains of the mound had been left uncovered; so they hastily cut down branches and covered up the ruins. After that the Wollunqua ceased to growl: there was no more thunder.[142]
Ground drawings of the Wollunqua.
On the four following days ceremonies of an entirely different kind from all the preceding were performed in honour of the Wollunqua. A space of sandy ground was smoothed down, sprinkled with water, and rubbed so as to form a compact surface. The smooth surface was then overlaid with a coat of red or yellow ochre, and on this coloured background a number of designs were traced, one after the other, by a series of white dots, which together made up a pattern of curved lines and concentric circles. These patterns represented the Wollunqua and some of his traditionary adventures. The snake himself was portrayed by a broad wavy band, but all the other designs were purely conventional; for example, trees, ant-hills, and wells were alike indicated by circles. Altogether there were eight such drawings on the earth, some of them very elaborate and entailing, each of them, not less than six or seven hours' labour: one of them was ten feet long. Each drawing was rubbed out before the next one was drawn. Moreover, the drawings were accompanied by little dramas acted by decorated men. In one of these dramas no fewer than eight actors took part, some of whom wore head-dresses adorned with a long wavy band to represent the Wollunqua. The last drawing of all was supposed to portray the mythical snake as he plunged into the earth and returned to his home in the rocky pool called Thapauerlu among the Murchison Ranges.[143]
Religious importance of the Wollunqua.
I have dwelt at some length on these ceremonies of the Wollunqua totem, because they furnish a remarkable and perhaps unique instance in Australia of a totemic ancestor in the act of developing into something like a god. In the Warramunga tribe there are other snake totems besides the Wollunqua; for example, there is the black snake totem and the deaf adder totem. But this purely mythical water-snake, the Wollunqua, is the most important of them all and is regarded as the great father of all the snakes. "It is not easy," say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "to express in words what is in reality rather a vague feeling amongst the natives, but after carefully watching the different series of ceremonies we were impressed with the feeling that the Wollunqua represented to the native mind the idea of a dominant totem."[144] Thus he is at once a fabulous animal and the mythical ancestor of a human clan, but his animal nature apparently predominates over his semi-human nature, as shewn by the drawings and effigies of him, all of which are in serpent form. The prayers offered to him at the pool which he is supposed to haunt, and the attempt to please him by drawing his likeness can only be regarded as propitiatory rites and therefore as rudimentary forms of worship. And the idea that thunder is his voice, and that the rain is a gift sent by him in return for the homage paid to him by the people, appears to prove that in course of time, if left to himself, he might easily have been elevated to the sky and have ranked as a celestial deity, who dwells aloft and sends down or withholds the refreshing showers at his good pleasure. Thus the Wollunqua, a rude creation of the savage Australian imagination, possesses a high interest for the historian of religion, since he combines elements of ancestor worship and totem worship with a germ of heaven worship; while on the purely material side his representation, both in plastic form by a curved bundle of grass-stalks and in graphic form by broad wavy bands of red down, may be said in a sense to stand at the starting-point of that long development of religious art, which in so many countries and so many ages has attempted to represent to the bodily eye the mysteries of the unseen and invisible, and which, whatever we may think of the success or failure of that attempt, has given to the world some of the noblest works of sculpture and painting.
Possible religious evolution of totemism.
I have already pointed out the difficulty of seeing how a belief in the reincarnation of the dead, such as prevails universally among the aborigines of Central Australia, could ever be reconciled with or develop into a worship of the dead; for by identifying the living with the dead, the theory of reincarnation seems to abolish that distinction between the worshipper and the worshipped which is essential to the existence of worship. But, as I also indicated, what seems a loophole or mode of escape from the dilemma may be furnished by the belief of these savages, that though they themselves are nothing but their ancestors come to life again, nevertheless in their earliest incarnations of the alcheringa or dream times their ancestors possessed miraculous powers which they have admittedly lost in their later reincarnations; for this suggests an incipient discrimination or line of cleavage between the living and the dead; it hints that perhaps after all the first ancestors, with their marvellous endowments, may have been entirely different persons from their feebler descendants, and if this vague hint could only grow into a firm conviction of the essential difference between the two, then the course would be clear for the development of ancestor worship: the dead forefathers, viewed as beings perfectly distinct from and far superior to the living, might easily come to receive from the latter the homage of prayer and sacrifice, might be besought by their descendants to protect them in danger and to succour them in all the manifold ills of life, or at least to abstain from injuring them. Now, this important step in religious evolution appears to have been actually taken by the Wollunqua, the mythical water-snake, who is the totem of one of the Warramunga clans. Unlike all the other totems he is supposed to exist only in his invisible and animal form and never to be reincarnated in a man.[145] Hence, withdrawn as he is from the real world of sense, the imagination is free to play about him and to invest him more and more with those supernatural attributes which men ascribe to their deities. And what has actually happened to this particular totemic ancestor might under favourable circumstances happen to many others. Each of them might be gradually detached from the line of his descendants, might cease to be reincarnated in them, and might gradually attain to the lonely pre-eminence of godhead. Thus a system of pure totemism, such as prevails among the aborigines of Central Australia, might develop through a phase of ancestor worship into a pantheon of the ordinary type.
Conspicuous features of the landscape associated with ancestral spirits.
Although none of the other totemic ancestors of the Central Australian aborigines appears to have advanced so far on the road to religion as the Wollunqua, yet they all contain in germ the elements out of which a religion might have been developed. It is difficult for us civilised men to conceive the extent to which the thoughts and lives of these savages are dominated by the memories and traditions of the dead. Every conspicuous feature in the landscape is not only associated with the legendary doings of some ancestors but is commonly said to have arisen as a direct result of their actions. The mountains, the plains, the rivers, the seas, the islands of ancient Greece itself were not more thickly haunted by the phantoms of a fairy mythology than are the barren sun-scorched steppes and stony hills of the Australian wilderness; but great indeed is the gulf which divides the beautiful creations of Greek fancy from the crude imaginings of the Australian savage, whose legendary tales are for the most part a mere tissue of trivial absurdities unrelieved by a single touch of beauty or poetry.
A journey through the Warramunga country.