The Faith Instinct (17 page)

The practices of the Andaman Islanders show how central a part religion played in their daily lives and how intimately in their belief the real world and the supernatural world were entwined. But for preoccupation with religion, few societies can rival those of Australia before colonization.

The third people whose religion sheds light on that of the ancestral population are Australian Aborigines. New genetic evidence shows that, contrary to previous belief, the Aborigines appear to have been truly isolated for 45,000 years ever since reaching Sahul, the now foundered continent that then included Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. Australian religious practices seem therefore likely
to have been derived in a direct line of descent from that of the ancestral human population, without outside influences.

Anthropologists had long believed that several later groups of
invaders also arrived in Australia, bringing other cultural inf
luences. One reason was that the early skulls unearthed in the continent are of two
different shapes. Another was the presence of the dingo, a semidomesticated dog; dog
s were domesticated from wolves only 15,000 years ago, and dogs
almost always travel with their masters. But a genetic survey of Australian Aborigi
nes and Papuan speakers in Papua New Guinea (both part of Sahul
during the last ice age) shows that all are descended from a single founding stock.
Although people speaking Austronesian languages settled around
the coast of Papua New Guinea in recent times, it seems that the Aborigines managed
to keep Australia to themselves until the arrival of Europeans.
¹¹²
Any subsequent invaders were either killed or left no presently visible contribution to the population’s genetics. The differently shaped skulls must have arisen from adaptations within the aboriginal population to different local conditions. How the dingo arrived, apparently without masters, or with too few to have left any genetic trace, remains a puzzle.

Aboriginal religion is complex and it is not clear how much of it was properly recorded before native societies were changed and undermined by colonization. Nor is it easy to generalize because religious practice varied widely from one tribe to another, although similar themes are found throughout most of Australia. In Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, mortuary ceremonies are of major importance, whereas in central Australia the emphasis is on fertility rites and rites of initiation.

A salient feature of aboriginal religious practice, which also distinguishes the Kung San and Andaman Islander religions, is the emphasis on song and dance, together with the emotional intensity of the proceedings, and their extraordinary duration.

In Protestant churches Sunday service may last an hour, and the
re is grumbling if the minister’s sermon goes on too long. But many aboriginal
ceremonies lasted for days, with hours of singing through the
night. An initiation ceremony performed by the Arunta tribe of
central Australia in 1896 to 1897 “commenced in the middle of September, and c
ontinued till the middle of the succeeding January, during whic
h time there was a constant succession of ceremonies, not a day passing without one,
while there were sometimes as many as five or six within the t
wenty-four hours. They were held at various hours, always one or more during the day
light, and not infrequently one or two during the night, a favo
rite time being just before sunrise,” say Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, two
anthropologists who observed the proceedings.
¹¹³

The initiation rights were searingly intense experiences that would begin when a boy was kidnapped from his home and subjected to a series of deprivations and taboos. During mostly nighttime performances he would see the sacred narrative acted out and be taught the secrets
of the male cult. Among the Arunta, a boy was put through three of these ceremonies before being considered an adult member of society. The first, called
Lartna,
lasted 10 days and nights, culminating in the boy’s circumcision with a flint knife on the tenth night. Some six weeks later, when his wound had healed, he underwent a second rite, called
Ariltha
or subincision, a severe operation to the penis. Many years later, perhaps at age 25 or so, groups of young men underwent the final rite, called
Engwura,
the four-month marathon mentioned above.

Engwura
was a long series of rites involving the totem animals of the people in each of the tribe’s various localities and culminating in an ordeal by fire in which the men lay for five minutes at a time over burning embers, protected only by a layer of leaves. People would assemble in one place from all regions of the tribe’s territory, which occupied an area in central Australia stretching 300 miles north to south and 100 miles east to west. The effect of the ceremony, according to the Arunta, was to impart courage and wisdom and make its subjects “more kindly natured and less apt to quarrel.”
¹¹⁴

The
Engwura
involved all-night singing sessions, elaborate body-painting and costumes and performances of relevant parts of the
Alcheringa,
the Aborigines’ principal sacred narrative. One night’s program indicates the physical exertions involved, and the emotions elicited by the religious symbolism may have been equally intense: “During the evening close by the
Parra
[ceremonial mound] a dense group was formed with the older men standing in the centre, and the younger ones on the outside. In this way, as closely packed as possible, they sang together for some two hours, the group as a whole swaying backwards and forwards without ceasing. Then towards midnight they all sat down, and in this position, still closely packed together, they continued singing until between one and two o’clock, when the old men decorated the heads of the younger men with twigs and leaves of an Eremophila shrub.”
¹¹⁵

The ordeal by fire, repeated several times over, marks the fourth phase of the
Engwura
ceremony. The young men, considered now to be fully initiated, paint themselves with ochre for a nighttime ceremony. As they are sitting by the fire, Spencer and Gillen report, “A number of young women, who have been waiting out of sight of the fire, come near. Each one is decorated with a double horse-shoe shaped band of white pipe-clay which extends across the front of each thigh and the base of the abdomen. A flexible stick is held behind the neck and one end grasped by each hand. Standing in a group the women sway slightly from side to side, quivering in a most remarkable fashion, as they do so, the muscles of the thighs and of the base of the abdomen. The object of the decoration and movement is evident, and at this period of the ceremonies a general interchange, and also a lending of women takes place, and visiting natives are provided with temporary wives, though on this occasion in the Arunta tribe the women allotted to any man must be one to whom he is
unawa,
that is, who is lawfully eligible to him as a wife. This woman’s dance, which is of the most monotonous description possible, goes on night after night for perhaps two or three weeks, at the end of which time another dance is commenced.”
¹¹⁶

Spencer and Gillen may have found the women’s dances “monotonous,” but the young initiates, after their four months of deprivations and ordeals, possibly entertained a different opinion.

The
Engwura
and other ceremonies served to impress on
participants the details of the aboriginal sacred narrative in which the creators b
rought the present world into being. The creators did good thin
gs and bad, and were punished for transgressions such as incest or witnessing sacred
rites reserved for the other sex. As with religions elsewhere
in the world, the sacred narrative served as a source of moral instruction and a jus
tification of sanctions for breaking the tribe’s moral code. “The religi
ous system of the
dingari
is also a system of morality,” writes the anthropologist
Ronald Berndt, referring to the version of the sacred narrativ
e held by the people of the northwestern desert.
¹¹⁷

Besides encoding morality, aboriginal religion also provided for reconciliation between quarreling parties within a group. The Warramunga people of northern central Australia held a
Nathagura
or fire ceremony which was designed to bring all conflicts to an end. The ceremony lasted for 14 days. It began with a phase of practical jokes and insults, in which everyday customs and forms of respect were violated, without anyone taking offense.

After several days of further proceedings, which included a dramatic mock battle between the men’s and women’s groups, the ceremony culminated in a final rite lasting most of a day and night. All parties who had a serious unresolved dispute with each other were expected to engage in a symbolic duel with blazing firesticks, after which the matter was never to be referred to again. When darkness fell, the plaintiffs daubed themselves from head to toe with mud, then covered the mud with a thick layer of white pipe clay until they resembled “a weird, ghoul-like model of a human being” Adding to the effect, they tied on elaborate headdresses and covered their faces with down.

The aggrieved parties, twelve on this occasion, were then given ritual wands, inflammable poles made from a gum tree and called
wanmanmirri,
which they thrust into a fire and set ablaze. “The performance opened,” Spencer and Gillen continue, “with one of the men charging full tilt, holding his
wanmanmirri
like a bayonet, and driving the blazing end into the midst of a group of natives in the centre of which stood a man with whom, a year before, he had had a serious quarrel. Warded off with clubs and spear-throwers, the torch glanced upwards. This was the signal for the commencement of a general melee. Every
wanmanmirri
was blazing brilliantly, the men were leaping and prancing about, yelling wildly all the time; the burning torches continually came crashing down
upon the heads and bodies of the men, scattering lighted embers all around, until the air was full of falling sparks, and the weird, whitened bodies of the combatants were alight with burning twigs and leaves. The smoke, the blazing torches, the showers of sparks falling in all directions and the mass of dancing, yelling men with their bodies grotesquely bedaubed, formed altogether a genuinely wild and savage scene of which it is impossible to convey any adequate idea in words.”

Several more rituals followed throughout the night, and the performance concluded just after sunrise, 18 hours after it began. The men wearily removed their headdresses and rubbed the down from their faces. The last act of the fire ceremony was over. Of the meaning of the various rituals, Spencer and Gillen could find little explanation. “All that the old man who had charge of the series could tell us, and all, apparently, that they knew was, that it had been handed down to them from the far past just as it used to be performed by their Alcheringa ancestors, and that its object was to finally settle up old quarrels, and to make the men friendly disposed towards one another.”
¹¹⁸

But the old man had surely given all the explanation that was needed: the purpose of the fire ceremony was to patch up divisive disputes in an emotionally decisive way and thus repair the social fabric; the precise form was arbitrary. The extraordinary physical effort and emotional intensity that the Warramunga invested in the ceremony is proof of the importance they attached to reconciliation and social cohesion. Religion was the means whereby they attained these goals.

The reports by Spencer and Gillen were a principal source on which Durkheim based his analysis of religion. Several aspects of Durkheim’s thesis have been criticized, notably his argument that people divide the world into the sacred and the profane. Many primitive peoples, the Aborigines chief among them, seem to make no such distinction. Almost every aspect of their daily lives has religious significance or is subject to some religious constraint. The distinction between what is sacred and what is secular seems to be principally a European notion which springs most naturally from the Western separation of church and state. Durkheim cited the Aborigines’ clan structure, as described by Spencer and Gillen, in support of his central argument that religion embodies the moral power of society, but later observers have taken issue with some of Spencer and Gillen’s interpretations, undermining part of the empirical support for Durkheim’s theory.

Nonetheless, Durkheim’s central insight that religion unites people into a single community seems to have been correct, both for Aborigines and for other peoples. “As for the social implications of primitive religion,” writes the sociologist Robert Bellah after a discussion of Aborigine beliefs, “Durkheim’s analysis still seems to be largely acceptable. The ritual life does reinforce the solidarity of society and serves to induct the young into the norms of tribal behavior.”
¹¹⁹

From a biological perspective, aboriginal religion confers many obvious benefits on a group. It binds the men with terrifying but emotionally cohesive initiation rites. (Women have separate initiation rites, about which less is known.) It stipulates a moral code and sanctions in the form of the sacred narrative in which everyone is indoctrinated at initiation rites and other ceremonies. It provides a conciliation mechanism for erasing quarrels and enhancing the quality of society.

These benefits do not come without cost. Religious ceremonies seem to have occupied an extraordinary amount of everyone’s time. The initiation ceremonies carried a risk of infection and death. And the sacred narrative imposed or supported two counterfactual beliefs with far-reaching consequences.

One was that natural causes were not accepted by the Aborigines as a cause of death, meaning that no one was considered to have died of old age. People died because of sorcery, and their relatives did not rest until the guilty party had been identified and if possible killed. This was a perpetual source of social strife.