owledge in Baiame.(1)
Of this I was unaware, or neglected it, for I explicitly said that I
followed Mr. Howitt's account, where no such matter is mentioned. Mr.
Howitt, in fact, described the Mysteries of the Coast Murring, while
the narrator of the low myths, Mr. Matthews, described those of a
remote tribe, the Wiraijuri, with whom Daramulun is not the chief, but
a subordinate person. How Mr. Matthews' friends can at once hold that
Daramulun was "destroyed" by Baiame (their chief deity), and also that
Daramulun's voice is heard at their rites, I don't know.(2) Nor do I
know why Mr. Hartland takes the myth of a tribe where Daramulun is "the
evil spirit who rules the night,"(3) and introduces it as an argument
against the belief of a distant tribe, where, by Mr. Howitt's account,
Daramulun is not an evil spirit, but "the master" of all, whose abode
is above the sky, and to whom are attributed powers of omnipotence
and omnipresence, or, at any rate, the power "to do anything and to
go anywhere.... To his direct ordinances are attributed the social and
moral laws of the community."(4) This is not "an evil spirit"! When Mr.
Hartland goes for scandals to a remote tribe of a different creed
that he may discredit the creed of the Coast Murring, he might as well
attribute to the Free Kirk "the errors of Rome". But Mr. Hartland does
it!(5) Being "cunning of fence" he may reply that I also spoke loosely
of Wiraijuri and Coast Murring as, indifferently, Daramulunites. I did,
and I was wrong, and my critic ought not to accept but to expose my
error. The Wiraijuri Daramulun, who was annihilated, yet who is "an evil
spirit that rules the night," is not the Murring guardian and founder of
recognised ethics.

(1) J. A. I., xxv. p. 297.

(2) Ibid., May, 1895, p. 419.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid., xiii. pp. 458, 459.

(5) Folk-Lore, ix., No. iv., p. 299.

But, in the Wiraijuri mysteries, the master, Baiame, deceives the women
as to the Mysteries! Shocking to US, but to deceive the women as to
these arcana, is, to the Australian mind in general, necessary for the
safety of the world. Moreover, we have heard of a lying spirit sent
to deceive prophets in a much higher creed. Finally, in a myth of
the Mystery of the Wiraijuri, Baiame is not omniscient. Indeed, even
civilised races cannot keep on the level of these religious conceptions,
and not to keep on that level is--mythology. Apollo, in the hymn to
Hermes, sung on a sacred occasion