ho are given an individual totem called Yunbeai. This they
must never eat or they will die. Any injury to his yunbeai hurts the
man himself In danger he has the power to assume the shape of his
yunbeai, which of course is a great assistance to him, especially in
legendary lore; but, on the other hand, a yunbeai is almost a Heel of
Achilles to a wirreenun (see the chapter on Medicine and Magic).

Women are given a yunbeai too, sometimes. One girl had a yunbeai given
her as a child, and she was to be brought up as a witch, but she caught
rheumatic fever which left her with St. Vitus's dance. The yunbeai
during one of her bad attacks jumped out of her, and she lost her
chance of witchery. One old fellow told me once that when he was going
to a public-house he took a miniature form of his yunbeai, which was
the Kurrea--crocodile--out of himself and put it safety in a bottle of
water, in case by any chance he got drunk, and an enemy, knowing his
yunbeai, coaxed it away. I wanted to see that yunbeai in a bottle, but
never succeeded.

The differences between the hereditary totem or Dhe, inherited from the
mother, and the individual totem or yunbeai, acquired by chance, are
these: Food restrictions do not affect the totem, but marriage
restrictions do; the yunbeai has no marriage restrictions; a man having
an opossum for yunbeai may marry a woman having the same either as her
yunbeai or hereditary totem, other things being in order, but under no
circumstances must a yunbeai be eaten by its possessor.

The yunbeai is a sort of alter ego; a man's spirit is in his yunbeai,
and his yunbeai's spirit in him.

A Minggah, or spirit-haunted tree of an individual, usually chosen from
amongst a man's multiplex totems, is another source of danger to him,
as also a help.

As Mr. Canton says: 'What singular threads of superstition bind the
ends of the earth together! In an old German story a pair of lovers
about to part chose each a tree, and by the tree of the absent one was
the one left to know of his wellbeing or the reverse. In time his tree
died, and she, hearing no news of him, pined away, her tree withering
with her, and both dying at the same time.

Well, that is just what a wirreenun would believe about his Minggah.
These Minggah and Goomarh spirit trees and stones always make me think,
perhaps irrelevantly, of one of the restored sayings of the Lord, which
ends 'Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood,