t in the
opinion of the Warramunga the general effect of performing these
ancestral plays is to increase the supply of food of the tribe. No
wonder, therefore, that the dramas are sacred, and that the natives
attribute the most serious significance to their performance: the
neglect to perform them might, in their judgment, bring famine and ruin
on the whole tribe. As Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, speaking of these
ceremonies, justly observe: "Their proper performance is a matter of
very great importance in the eyes of the natives, because, not only do
they serve to keep alive and hand down from generation to generation the
traditions of the tribe, but they are, at least amongst the Warramunga,
intimately associated with the most important object of maintaining the
food supply, as every totemic group is held responsible for the
maintenance of the material object the name of which it bears."[159]

[Sidenote: General view of the attitude of the Central Australian
natives towards their dead.]

To sum up the attitude of the Central Australian natives towards their
dead. They believe that their dead are constantly undergoing
reincarnation by being born again of women into the world, in fact that
every living man, woman, and child is nothing but a dead person come to
life again, that so it has been from the beginning and that so it will
be to the end. Of a special world of the departed, remote and different
from the material world in which they live and from the familiar scenes
to which they have been accustomed from infancy, they have no
conception; still less, if that is possible, have they any idea of a
division of the world of the dead into a realm of bliss and a realm of
woe, where the spirits of the good live ineffably happy and the spirits
of the bad live unspeakably miserable. To their simple minds the spirits
of the dead dwell all about them in the rocky gorges, the barren plains,
the wooded dells, the rustling trees, the still waters of their native
land, haunting in death the very spots where they last entered into
their mothers' wombs to be born, and where in future they will again
enter into the wombs of other women to be born again as other children
into the world. And so, they think, it will go on for ever and ever.
Such a creed seems at first sight, as I have pointed out, irreconcilable
with a worship of the dead in the proper sense of the word; and so
perhaps it would be, if these savages were strictly consiste