Arunta people

“ These ideas of conception presuppose a very primitive civilisation, such as we find to-day among the Arunta people of central Australia, according to whose ideas the conception is due to an ancestral spirit entering into the woman; when the child is born he is a reincarnation of that ancestral spirit. ”

“ These spirit children, like the spirits of the tribal ancestors, themselves enter into the women and are borne by them. The Arunta believe that at the death of a person his spirit returns to a special tree or rock, out of which it came, and which is called nandcha. It remains there until it thinks fit once more to enter into a woman, and thus go amongst the living. ”

“ Men and women of the same totem may intermarry, their children need not belong to the totem of either father or mother.
The process by which Arunta totems came thus to differ from those of all other savages is easily understood. Like the other tribes from the centre to the north (including the Urabunna nation, which reckons descent through women) , the Arunta believe that the souls of the primal semi-bestial ancestors of the Alcheringa or “dream time” are perpetually reincarnated. ”

“ Each Arunta child, by that philosophy, has been in being since the Alcheringa: his mother of the moment only reproduces him, after 'preparation.' He is not a new thing; he is as old as the development of organic forms. This is the Arunta belief, and I must reckon it as not more primitive than the peculiar philosophy of reincarnation of ancestral spirits. Certainly such an elaborate philosophy manifestly cannot be primitive. It is, however, the philosophy of the tribes from the Urabunna, on Lake Eyre (with female descent of the totem) , to the most northerly tribes, with male descent. ”

“ Of course, as we tried to show, that explanation of primeval exogamy is improbable, but it is the explanation given by the Arunta legend. With a grain of fact, as to innovations from the North, the legend is a myth, an ætiological myth, a myth explanatory of the origin of the present organisation. History it is not. The Arunta [Pg 80] 'traditions' are not historical evidence in favour of the new hypothesis that the Arunta are 'primitive,' are in 'the chrysalis stage' of humanity ”

“ Spencer and Gillen is exhaustive, and granting that (as Mr. J.G. Frazer holds, in his essays in the 'Fortnightly Review,' April and May, 1899) the Arunta are the most primitive of mortals, it will seem to follow that the moral attributes of Baiame and other gods of other Australian regions are later accretions round the form of an original and confessed bugbear, as among the primitive Arunta, 'a bogle of the nursery,' in the phrase repudiated by Maitland of Lethington. ”

“ The Arunta reckon kinship in the male line: Arunta customs. their phratry names they have forgotten, in place of phratries eight matrimonial classes regulate marriage. In these respects they resemble most of the central and northern tribes, but present this unique peculiarity, that the same totems may and do exist in both of the opposed intermarrying exogamous divisions consisting of four classes each. It thus results that a man, in the Arunta tribe, may marry a woman of his own totem, if she be in the class with which he may intermarry. ”

“ I know that I could not live in Italy, and I suppose that I should be dreadfully offended and grieved by the actual state of the people, in the midst of all the past and present glory and beauty, which remains a radiant halo round their social and political degradation. But I did once so long to live in Italy, and I have lately so longed to see it, that these journals of Arnold's have made me cry like a child with yearning and disappointment. ”

“ One can hardly conceive that such human beings herded in large hordes, rather they would wander in small 'family' groups. These would be mutually hostile, or at least jealous: they could scarcely yet have established a modus vivendi, and coalesced into the friendly aggregate of a local tribe, such as Arunta, Dieri, Urabunna, and so on. Such tribes have now their common councils and mysteries lasting for months among the Arunta. We cannot predicate such friendly union of groups in a tribe, for the small and jealous knots of really early men ”

“ They have local head-men, or Alatunjas, whose office passes always in the male line: from father to son, if the son be of age to succeed, or, if he is not, to the brother, on whose death it reverts to the son. An Alatunja dying without a son nominates a brother or nephew to succeed him. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen know no equivalent to this law among other Australian tribes, and it indicates, among the so-called 'primitive' Arunta, a marked advance beyond other tribes in social evolution. ”

“ Arunta society is not a "sport" under this view, but a product—a product to be accounted for and explained by anthropological rules, derived not only from Australian society but from the general facts of human society which have remained for observation by the science of to-day. The parallel between Semang and Arunta, therefore, helps us in two ways. It enables us to go back to Semang totemism as an example of primitive kinless society, and forward to Arunta totemism as an example of early development therefrom. ”

“ Another difficulty is that while the Arunta, with no religion, and the Kaitish, with the Atnatu belief, are socially advanced in organisation (whether we reckon male descent of the totem 'a great step in progress,' or an accident) , they are yet supposed by Mr. Frazer to be, in one respect, the least advanced, the most primitive, of known human beings. ”

“ If, then, the tribe possesses a peculiar institution, contravening what is universally practised, the natural inference is that the Arunta institution, being absolutely isolated and unique, as far as its non-exogamy goes, in an advanced tribe, is a local freak or "sport," like many others which exist. ”

“ Similar figures, associated with the mysteries, are, in other parts of Australia, provided with an ample mythology, and are subject to a being more august and remote. But either the Arunta are advanced thinkers who have passed beyond such ideas, or they have not yet attained to them, or our witnesses are uninformed on the subject. [7] In any case, the first-fruits of the game, grubs, and plants of the Arunta are not offered to Twanyirika, or to the minor sprites, Iruntarinia. ”

“ Yet it may be well to keep in view that no two tribes are practically at the same point of development, as indicated for instance by an advance from group marriage to some form of individual marriage. Thus I see no difficulty in believing that while the Arunta have reached male descent with segmentation into eight sub-classes, they may have retained early beliefs as to their totem ancestors. ”

“ Spencer and Gillen have broken most seriously into our previous conceptions is that of social organisation. Hitherto all the totem-clans known to science had an invariable rule against marriage between men and women who belonged to the same clan and bore the same totem. This rule the Arunta totally disregard. Their marriage-regulations are founded upon a different principle. Formerly, indeed, if we may trust their traditions of the Alcheringa, the Arunta did observe the clan-system. ”

“ Caste reserved some privileges for priests, and some privileges for warriors, in ancient times; but never divided and disunited the Aryan people. Priests and warriors and citizens, though following their hereditary professions from generation to generation, felt that they were one nation and one race, received the same religious instructions, attended the same schools of learning, possessed the same literature and traditions, ate and drank together, intermarried and intermixed in all respects, and were proud to call themselves the Aryan race. ”

“ Howitt, that the male is the sole originating cause of children, while the female is only the recipient and 'nurse.' These tribes, socially less advanced than the Arunta, have not the Arunta nescience of the facts of procreation, a nescience which I regard as merely the consequence and corollary of the Arunta philosophy of reincarnation. ”

“ Every individual is supposed to be the reincarnation of an Alcheringa being, or, in other words, one of the ancestors. Thus one of the most remarkable features in the beliefs of the Arunta is that of the existence of spirit-ancestors who become reincarnate by entering some woman, and are again born under their original totem names. ”

“ About this time a new field of labor was providentially opened to this Christian worker. The Presbyterian and Baptist churches in that town began to employ "evangelists" to hold "revival meetings" of a new order; but when the people appeared to be thoughtful, and they got them into the "anxious meetings," they found it almost impossible to get them to praying or the church to praying for them directly and earnestly, especially the sisterhood of the Presbyterian church; so the deacons and elders, in their strait, begged Mrs. Arnold to "come over into Macedonia and help." ”

“ The Arnauts are Roman Catholics, and, as Christians, are by law forbidden to carry arms in the towns. But these powerful tribes are too strong to heed the government regulations. No Arnaut ever comes into the town without his arms, and no one dares interfere with him.
Our friend the gendarme took us to the stall of a friend of his—a notable man, Bektsé Tchotché by name. He was an ill-featured Albanian Mussulman, about forty years of age, dressed in a national costume that must have cost hundreds of pounds, so rich it was. ”

“ As to the tribes which have ceremonies of the western type, I must now point out that missions have been in existence in the Narrang-ga, the Parnkalla, the Dieri, and the Arunta tribes for long periods. In all of them, with perhaps the exception of the Narrang-ga, the missionaries have taught and preached in the native language, and as to the Arunta have, I believe, evolved a name for the Deity from the term which Spencer and Gillen have given as Alcheringa, or the Alcheringa ancestors. ”

“ This view is supported by the widespread organisation of eaglehawk and crow, and by the general homogeneity of Australian social forms. It is clear, therefore, that room is made for the external organisation of the class system and the consequent [Pg 273] production of the dual characteristics of the Arunta—the joint product of the fossilisation of mother-right society at the end of the migration movement, and the superimposing upon this fossilisation, with its tendency towards the class system, of the fully organised class system. The two systems are not now fully welded in the Arunta group. ”

“ Next we have the third class of the population, the most interesting of all, the country people—or rather, mountaineers, for little but mountain is there in North Albania. These are the Arnauts—Skipitars, as they call themselves—a fierce, hardy race of almost savages, independent, unconquered by the Turks. They too are Latin Christians, but how different from their co-religionists in the town! Their features are indicative of minds that would not tolerate slavery. ”

“ The ordeals of the Arunta and of the various Red Indian tribes are familiar to most of us. These ceremonies are often involved in a good deal both of mystery and of charlatanry. The youths initiated, for instance, sometimes are supposed to die and be born again. The process is secret. [Pg 70] The women of the tribe are kept carefully away. The neighbourhood is filled with the warning sound of the Rhombos or Bull-roarer—that ‘whirring of immortal things’ which Hesiod perhaps means when he speaks of the air resounding ῥιπᾖ ὑπ’ ἀθανάτων. ”

“ For although Arjuna is himself concerned only with his own situation, his inner struggle and the law of action he must follow, yet, as we have seen, the particular question he raises, in the manner in which he raises it does really bring up the whole question of human life and action, what the world is and why it is and how possibly, it being what it is, life here in the world can be reconciled with life in the Spirit. ”

“ The simple formula, pre-Aryan, Aryan, non-Aryan, affords the key to the historical development of European ethnology. PRE-ARYAN PEOPLES. Of the presumably pre-Aryan peoples of western Europe the Iberians occupy easily the first place. The seat of this people at the dawn of history was in Spain and southern France; their ethnology belongs entirely to the realm of conjecture. They are of much darker complexion than the Aryans and their racial characteristic is conservatism even to stubbornness, which places them in marked contrast to their immediate Aryan neighbors, the volatile Celts. ”

“ The western Aryans had every nation and tribe like their eastern brethren of the fifth race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity, while now several of them have reached their Iron age, the Kali Yuga, an age black with horrors. This state will last ... until we begin acting from within instead of ever following impulses from without.... Until then the only palliative is union and harmony—a Brotherhood in actu and altruism not simply in name. ”

“ Ah, heart of gold, why art thou broke? O King!
Whence falleth he?'
"And Yudhishthira said,
Not pausing: 'Once he lied, a lordly lie!
He bragged—our brother—that a single day
Should see him utterly consume, alone,
All those his enemies,—which could not be.
Yet from a great heart sprang the unmeasured speech.
Howbeit, a finished hero should not shame
Himself in such wise, nor his enemy,
If he will faultless fight and blameless die:
This was Arjuna's sin. Follow thou me!'
"So the king still went on. ”