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.

[Sidenote: Possible religious evolution of totemism.]

I have already pointed out t