nt and
logical in their theories. But they are not. They admit that their
remote ancestors, in other words, that they themselves in former
incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the
present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant
admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the
living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impassable
gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if
left to themselves, might come to hold that the dead return no more to
the land of the living, and that, acknowledging as they do the vast
superiority of their remote ancestors to themselves, they might end by
worshipping them, at first simply as powerful ancestral spirits, and
afterwards as supernatural deities, whose original connexion with
humanity had been totally forgotten. In point of fact we saw that among
the Warramunga the mythical water-snake Wollunqua, who is regarded as an
ancestor of a totemic clan, has made some progress towards deification;
for while he is still regarded as the forefather of the clan which bears
his name, it is no longer supposed that he is born again of women into
the world, but that he lives eternal and invisible under the water of a
haunted pool, and that he has it in his power both to help and to harm
his people, who pray to him and perform ceremonies in his honour. This
awful being, whose voice is heard in the peal of thunder and whose
dreadful name may not be pronounced in common life, is not far from
godhead; at least he is apparently the nearest approach to it which the
imagination of these rude savages has been able to conceive. Lastly, as
I have pointed out, the reverence which the Central Australians
entertain for their dead ancestors is closely bound up with their
totemism; they fail to distinguish clearly or at all between men and
their totems, and accordingly the ceremonies which they perform to
commemorate the dead are at the same time magical rites designed to
ensure an abundant supply of food and of all the other necessaries and
conveniences which savage life requires or admits of; indeed, we may
with some probability conjecture that the magical intention of these
ceremonies is the primary and original one, and that the commemorative
intention is secondary and derivative. If that could be proved to be so
(which is hardly to be expected), we should be obliged to conclude that
in this as in so ma