, or what not. The memory of all such
spots has been carefully preserved and handed down from generation to
generation by the old men, and it is to these spots that down to the
present day the souls of all the dead regularly repair in order to await
reincarnation. The Arunta call the places _oknanikilla_, and we may call
them local totem centres, because they are the centres where the spirits
of the departed assemble according to their totems.[118]

[Sidenote: Every living person has also his or her sacred stick or stone
(_churinga_), with which his or her spirit is closely bound up.]

But it is not merely the remote forefathers of the Central Australian
savages who are said to have been possessed of these sacred sticks or
stones: every man and woman who is born into the world has one of them,
with which his or her spirit is believed to be closely bound up. This is
intelligible when we remember that every living person is believed to be
simply the reincarnation of an ancestor; for that being so he naturally
comes to life with all the attributes which belonged to him in his
previous state of existence on earth. The notion of the natives is that
when a spirit child enters into a woman to be born, he immediately drops
his sacred stick or stone on the spot, which is necessarily one of what
we have called the local totem centres, since in the opinion of the
natives it is only at or near them that a woman can conceive a child.
Hence when her child is born, the woman tells her husband the place
where she fancies that the infant entered into her, and he goes with
some old men to find the precious object, the stick or stone dropped by
the spirit of the infant when it entered into the mother. If it cannot
be found, the men cut a wooden one from the nearest hard-wood tree, and
this becomes the sacred stick or _churinga_ of the newborn child. The
exact spot, whether a tree or a stone or what not, in which the child's
spirit is supposed to have tarried in the interval between its
incarnations, is called its _nanja_ tree or stone or what not. A
definite relation is supposed to exist between each individual and his
_nanja_ tree or stone. The tree or stone and any animal or bird that
lights upon it is sacred to him and may not be molested. A native has
been known earnestly to intercede with a white man to spare a tree
because it was his _nanja_ or birth-tree, and he feared that evil would
befall him if it were cut down.[119]

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