them with red ochre and decorates them with birds' down,
chanting a spell all the time. Then he rubs them together so that the
down flies off in all directions; this is supposed to carry with it the
magical virtue of the sticks or stones and so to fertilise the
grass-seed.[133]

[Sidenote: Elements of a worship of the dead. Marvellous powers
attributed by the Central Australians to their remote ancestors of the
_alcheringa_ or dream time.]

On the whole, when we survey these practices and beliefs of the Central
Australian aborigines, we may perhaps conclude that, if they do not
amount to a worship of the dead, they at least contain the elements out
of which such a worship might easily be developed. At first sight, no
doubt, their faith in the transmigration of souls seems and perhaps
really is a serious impediment to a worship of the dead in the strict
sense of the word. For if they themselves are the dead come to life
again, it is difficult to see how they can worship the spirits of the
dead without also worshipping each other, since they are all by
hypothesis simply these worshipful spirits reincarnated. But though in
theory every living man and woman is merely an ancestor or ancestress
born again and therefore should be his or her equal, in practice they
appear to admit that their forefathers of the remote _alcheringa_ or
dream time were endowed with many marvellous powers which their modern
reincarnations cannot lay claim to, and that accordingly these ancestral
spirits were more to be reverenced, were in fact more worshipful, than
their living representatives. On this subject Messrs. Spencer and Gillen
observe: "The Central Australian native is firmly convinced, as will be
seen from the accounts relating to their _alcheringa_ ancestors, that
the latter were endowed with powers such as no living man now possesses.
They could travel underground or mount into the sky, and could make
creeks and water-courses, mountain-ranges, sand-hills, and plains. In
very many cases the actual names of these natives are preserved in their
traditions, but, so far as we have been able to discover, there is no
instance of any one of them being regarded in the light of a 'deity.'
Amongst the Central Australian natives there is never any idea of
appealing for assistance to any one of these Alcheringa ancestors in any
way, nor is there any attempt made in the direction of propitiation,
with one single exception in the case of the mythic