te: Sanctity of the _churinga_.]

Thus in these Central Australian tribes every man, woman, and child has
his or her sacred birth-stone or stick. But though every woman, like
every man, has her sacred birth-stone or stick, she is never allowed to
see it under pain of death or of being blinded with a fire-stick. Indeed
none but old women are aware even of the existence of such things.
Uninitiated men are likewise forbidden under the same severe penalties
ever to look upon these most sacred objects.[120] The sanctity ascribed
to the sticks and stones is intelligible when we remember that the
spirits of all the people both living and dead are believed to be
intimately associated with them. Each of them, we are told, is supposed
to be so closely bound up with a person's spirit that it may be regarded
as his or her representative, and those of dead people are believed to
be endowed with the attributes of their former owners and actually to
impart them to any one who happens to carry them about with him. Hence
these apparently insignificant sticks and stones are, in the opinion of
the natives, most potent instruments for conveying to the living the
virtues and powers of the dead. For example, in a fight the possession
of one of these holy sticks or stones is thought to endow the possessor
with courage and accuracy of aim and also to deprive his adversary of
these qualities. So firmly is this belief held, that if two men were
fighting and one of them knew that the other carried a sacred
birth-stone or stick while he himself did not, he would certainly lose
heart and be beaten. Again, when a man is sick, he will sometimes have
one of these sacred stones brought to him and will scrape a little dust
off it, mix the dust with water, and drink it. This is supposed to
strengthen him. Clearly he imagines that with the scrapings of the stone
he absorbs the strength and other qualities of the person to whom the
stone belonged.[121]

[Sidenote: Sacred store-houses (_ertnatulunga_) of the _churinga_.]

All the birth-stones or sticks (_churinga_) belonging to any particular
totemic group are kept together, hidden away from the eyes of women and
uninitiated men, in a sacred store-house or _ertnatulunga_, as the
Arunta and Unmatjera call it. This store-house is always situated in one
of the local totem centres or _oknanikilla_, which, as we have seen,
vary in size from a few yards to many square miles. In itself the sacred
treasure-house