he difficulty of seeing how a belief in the
reincarnation of the dead, such as prevails universally among the
aborigines of Central Australia, could ever be reconciled with or
develop into a worship of the dead; for by identifying the living with
the dead, the theory of reincarnation seems to abolish that distinction
between the worshipper and the worshipped which is essential to the
existence of worship. But, as I also indicated, what seems a loophole or
mode of escape from the dilemma may be furnished by the belief of these
savages, that though they themselves are nothing but their ancestors
come to life again, nevertheless in their earliest incarnations of the
_alcheringa_ or dream times their ancestors possessed miraculous powers
which they have admittedly lost in their later reincarnations; for this
suggests an incipient discrimination or line of cleavage between the
living and the dead; it hints that perhaps after all the first
ancestors, with their marvellous endowments, may have been entirely
different persons from their feebler descendants, and if this vague hint
could only grow into a firm conviction of the essential difference
between the two, then the course would be clear for the development of
ancestor worship: the dead forefathers, viewed as beings perfectly
distinct from and far superior to the living, might easily come to
receive from the latter the homage of prayer and sacrifice, might be
besought by their descendants to protect them in danger and to succour
them in all the manifold ills of life, or at least to abstain from
injuring them. Now, this important step in religious evolution appears
to have been actually taken by the Wollunqua, the mythical water-snake,
who is the totem of one of the Warramunga clans. Unlike all the other
totems he is supposed to exist only in his invisible and animal form and
never to be reincarnated in a man.[145] Hence, withdrawn as he is from
the real world of sense, the imagination is free to play about him and
to invest him more and more with those supernatural attributes which men
ascribe to their deities. And what has actually happened to this
particular totemic ancestor might under favourable circumstances happen
to many others. Each of them might be gradually detached from the line
of his descendants, might cease to be reincarnated in them, and might
gradually attain to the lonely pre-eminence of godhead. Thus a system of
pure totemism, such as prevails among the abo