RELIGION
In the really strict sense of the word the people of wild Australia have
no religion. There is, as you have already seen, some faint belief in a
Supreme Being and Creator who is known by a different name in the
different tribes, but this belief in a Supreme Being makes no difference
to their lives and they do not recognize that they have any duties
towards him. He is pleased when certain ceremonies are performed
properly, and angry when they are performed carelessly or not at all,
but beyond that he takes no interest in them. They, for their part, do
not think it necessary to worry themselves about him. They never say
any prayers, they offer no sacrifices, they build no temples or altars,
and they make no idols. For these reasons we usually say they have no
religion.
That which takes the place of religion among them is fear of evil
spirits, the ghosts of the dead. These ghosts are always looked upon as
hostile, and always ready to do them harm. This belief is commonly known
as Animism. It is a general belief among all very primitive peoples.
Among some races, like the Kols of India, to whom the natives of
Australia are believed by some people to be very closely akin, it takes
the form of devil worship, and constant offerings are made to turn away
the anger of the spirits, but there is no attempt at propitiation, as
this is called, among the people of Australia. They live in constant
fear of spirits it is true, but their efforts are all in the direction
of avoiding them, or keeping them at a distance. For this reason they
will seldom camp beneath trees for the ghosts of men and women whose
bodies have been placed in those trees to decay may still be hovering
about among them and would come down and harm them if they dared to
sleep under their shadow. For this same reason, too, they never mention,
as you have already been told, the names of their dead. If the ghost
heard them talking about him he would conclude they were not
sufficiently sorry and would be very angry and be sure to harm them. A
white man was once talking with an aboriginal boy, and in the course of
his talk he three times mentioned rather loudly the name of a dead
black man. The boy was so frightened that he ran away as fast as he
could into the bush and did not appear again for several days. When a
death occurs any other members of the tribe will, as you have already
been told, at once change their names, and should the dead man or woman
have borne the name of some plant or animal a new name will at once be
given to it.
The aboriginals probably came to believe in spirits through their
dreams. In those dreams they have visited friends in some far-off tribe,
fought some battle, or engaged in a hunt, yet their bodies, they know,
have not moved from their resting-place. How could they have done this
unless they had a spirit which was able to pass out of their body during
sleep and go away on a journey. Some tribes give the name of _murup_ to
this spirit. At death the _murup_ leaves the body and either goes across
the sea, or along the milky way into the beautiful sky country, or
continues to haunt the scenes of its earthly life and especially the
place where the body is buried, so becoming a source of danger and
annoyance to those who remain alive. This is why most tribes move their
camp after a death has taken place and why the tribes in the Kimberley
District of Western Australia nearly always cross the river. The ghost
will have great difficulty in finding them and in any case he could not
cross water.
Some tribes believe that as soon as the dead body has completely turned
to dust the soul goes back to the rock or water-hole whence the totemic
ancestor, or great-great-greatest-grandfather of the dead man,
originally came. There it quietly waits until some little baby is born
in the immediate neighbourhood, when it passes into his body and so
again becomes incarnate.
You will have noticed from all this how the religion of the aborigines,
like all heathen religions, is based, wholly on fear. There is only one
religion, the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is based on Love.
This is the religion we want to teach them. It alone, we know, can
change their lives and drive out that awful fear. How it is changing
them you will learn in the next few chapters. "The Christians," said a
traveller in North Australia one day, "always look so happy. The
frightened look is altogether gone. You can always tell them." The man
who said this was, I am sorry to say, a Christian only in name, and had
long been known as a strong opponent of all missionary work among this
poor unhappy people, but this makes his words all the more remarkable.
They should help to stir us up to do much more in the future than we
have done in the past, and make us keener than ever to put forth all our
efforts to spread the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ among them that
His beautiful light may shine more and more in them and that men may
take knowledge of them that they have been with Jesus.